Originally Posted by cardcop
This has been my collecting specialty since 1991 pro line fb autographs. I was elated when leaf came out with the signature series baseball, but stars were short printed, even worse in the extended series.
Since i collected only on card certified autographs (cai) myself since 1991, i've seen examples of almost every cai out there. Plus i have a photographic long term memory. I caught 3 out of the four known cai forgeries where up to half or more of all were forgeries. There are instances where blank cai's hit the hobby and unscrupulous people sign these themselves & put on ebay (especially superstar players), but these are in such small quantities they are good to be aware of- but you'll likely never see one.
Since i collected only on card certified autographs (cai) myself since 1991, i've seen examples of almost every cai out there. Plus i have a photographic long term memory. I caught 3 out of the four known cai forgeries where up to half or more of all were forgeries. There are instances where blank cai's hit the hobby and unscrupulous people sign these themselves & put on ebay (especially superstar players), but these are in such small quantities they are good to be aware of- but you'll likely never see one.
The 1st caught was signature rookies erict rhett (buccaneers rb). He admitted his girlfriend signed over half of them but the then sr owner (before tim flatt) sent real replacements to all that requested them. He did the right thing.
The 2nd was 1994-95 press pass vip larry pearson. This jerk son of famous nascar driver david pearson had over half signed by who knows, but the signatures couldn't be more different. I caught this one right out of the gate where walmart had boxes with two autos per box. I actually pulled two larry pearsons out of the same box! This was the easiest way to catch forgeries. I immediately went to a cape coral dealer/cardshop owner i knew and i called press pass on speaker phone. Theiur long time female secretary answered and took absolutely no responsibility saying "we send the cards to players, we expect athletes to sign, but if they don't it's not our fault." i couldn't believe her complete ignorance of quality control! The card shop owner coulldn't believe her attitude either & he swore off press pass from then on.
The next big one was 1997 upper deck football legends donnie shell. It's almost as if i was destined to find these. My father was sent two replacements in late 1998 for the [several] players who never returned their cards signed to upper deck for this very popular product, with i believe four autos per box. I asked my father if i could open the bubble envelope. Inside were two donnie shell autos with again two totally different autographs (one signed by a female). At this time unknown to me, upper deck lent their autograph expert (anthony west) to the fbi to assist with operation bullpen. Turns out this is who i got on the phone when i called upper deck and told them i caught one of their cai's that was a definite forgery. They transferred me to anythony west only every time i9 called. At first west didn't believe me & kept trying to blow me off (i tape recorded all calls legally). Finally anthony west looked at a stack of the shell autos and noticed the forgery versions using the excuse that they missed them because of the "loud card backround". Then how did i see it instantly? West promised to destroy all the forgery versions they had left, but i did't trust him. At this time i ha the hobby's 1st free anti-fraud website and i reported all of this with est, step by step. I had hundreds of collectors on my emailing list who got scoops. These people took up a collection to fly me tohawaii for the trade conference in jan. 1999. They only could come up with $500. So i decided to fly to california & go to upper deck while all executives were in hawaii. I thought if everything went right; i'd get more evidence that way.
I went to upper deck's empty parking lot thinking they might be closed. But they weren't. There was a rather cold woman sitting in a chair & small table in the ground floor lobby. I told her anthony west left a copy of donnie shell''s contract to sign on hisc desk for me (i don't lie, but i had to say something to get in there). It was a shit in the dark, but then a nice female paralegal comes halfway down the black spiral staircase that goes up to the executive floor (i didn''t know it then, but no non-ud high ranking employee ever went up there before! Or after). Since only the paralegal was there, 1st she asked if i was a process server & i quickly said "no, absolutely not" (obviously ud got lots of documents delivered by process server such as lawsuits they refused to admit they received). So she invited me upstairs with a look of shock on the lobby employee's face. Lol
i went upstairs explaining to the paralegal what i told the lobby woman. The paralegal & i shook hands & i explained i fight fraud in the hobby for free and wanted to make sure westv kept his word because if not it could seriously harm ud's autograph trust. First we go into west's office and i told her the contract copy should be on top of west's desk- which of course it was not. What followed was the craziest things i could have ever imagined could have happened.
The paralegal leads me into room that you'd tink was a janitor's closet, it was their autograph contract room! It had one four drawer silver metal paperwork cabinet literally overflowing with athlete autograph contracts, mind you this was only jan. 1999, yet there were already thousands & thousands of autograph contracts! The paralegal found donnie sgell's contract in 5-minutes. She made a copy & gave it to me. Then she invited me into her office. I told my story in more detail regarding fighting other hobbyv fraud for free since 1991 & doing huge card/autograph donations every year to hospitalized children since 1989. She then offered to call quality control and have them bring up all donnie shell autos they had left. A guy bring up 3 100-count cases. We told him about the forgeries and he too used the "loud background" excuse. Obvioult west spoke to qa about the forgeries they missed. But what came next was even stranger. The paralegal opened a full case and started going through the autos. She pulled the first forgery as the 3rd card in the case, within 10-minutes she pulled 68 forgery versions out of 100 cards with a dumbfounded qa guy standing right there! He quickly left...
Then i went through a full case and pulled 65 forgeries out of 100. In total- 2/3rds of the autos (around 150/250) were forgeries, and i told the paralegal before we got these that west promised to destroy these already! See how useless anythony west is and the fbi used him as their autograph expert??? The only reason upper deck gave the fbi any help was because richard mcwilliam had his 2nd federal racketeering/bankruptcy fraud charges against him in 5-years, that the fbi made go away with him helping with operation bullpen. But what help could west actually offer? None i'm sure of! The paralegal sincerely thanked me for my help and assured me the forgeries would be destroyed this time.
However in 2011 pper deck releases a follow up to 1997 football legends (but they lost their nfl licensing by this point) so they release 2011 college legends autographs. But they put 1997 nfl legends "buyback" autographs randomly inserted in the college product & 65% of the hundreds of donnie shell buyback autos were the forgery version once again. Afer all i went through to get these forgeries out of the hobby, and 12-years later upper deck is still releasing them!!! I publicized the heck out of this story online (as best i could all by myself with not much money). Today i guarantee almost no one ev en knows this forgery version even exists. Everything i stated here are absiolute facts i can prove.
The last big cai forgery was dak prescott himself bringing rare versions of his rc autographs to a printer to put a preprint autograph of his cai cards (of the same exact signature version) on like 100 cards, but he had the printer change the size of his signatures. He thought he'd fool everyone (i couldn't stand this jerk ever since). For once i have to give graders credit, they caught all these that were sent for grading. I would have thought after the upper deck fiasco, legal documents would have been improved so athletes would get in legal trouble for knowingly distributing forgeries. No such luck...
Best wishes,
james aka cardcop
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10-13-2024, 07:02 PM
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