My service to check whether an item is counterfeit or not | Hacker News Reader

My service to check whether an item is counterfeit or not

bychgroup.com

169 pointschdaniel153 comments

Counterfeiting is becoming a real problem in Magic The Gathering. Just this past week I received a counterfeit card in an order from a reputable business. Once you start buying expensive MTG cards you need to know how to spot a counterfeit in order to protect yourself. Luckily with MTG cards the printing process is the same with cheap cards and expensive cards so you can easily compare the cards for differences. I imagine most people buying Yeazys don’t have an authentic pair to compare with.

I’m wondering how “counterfeit aware” payment processors (VISA, Mastercards, etc) are becoming? It seems like counterfeits are only going to become more frequent in the future and payment processors should have some awareness of counterfeits when investigating a chargeback claim.

In what way is it a problem exactly? are counterfeit cards printed with unreadable font? do they fall apart when used? oooh, you mean its a problem for speculat^^^^investors, not for actually playing the game?

If you're trying to imply counterfeiting doesn't actually affect gameplay, counterfeit cards are not tournament legal. If you paid $100 to purchase a playset of 4 cards and you show up to a tournament and get declined entry, you'd rightfully be pissed at the counterfeiter.

Maybe the next response to that is "who cares about tournaments. Just play kitchen table magic with your friends." In that case sure, but still don't use counterfeit cards. "Proxy" cards are when a player prints out (or even hand-scribbles on paper) the image of the "real" card they want to use. No one is scammed out of money. It doesn't cost anymore than a sheet of printer paper and some ink. And because the card is obviously not official, there's no confusion as to it's authenticity.

At high levels, when a Tactic is to hoard certain cards, so that no one can “counter” your deck.

Never mind things like a black lotus which is over powered but still legal due to rarity.

Black lotus is illegal in tournament play except for Vintage.

Its also restricted there so you can only use 1 per deck!

I play MTG competitively, and if you actually believe this is a thing I'm afraid you have no idea what you are talking about. No competitive game has ever, at any point, worked that way.

From a gameplay perspective, the problem is exactly what your parent said: counterfeit product cannot be used in a sanctioned tournament. Which means most MTG organized play, since even very small in-store tournaments are usually sanctioned events.

This is the plot of the first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh, not a thing that actually happens in real life.

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My main problem with counterfeit cards is when someone pays for authentic cards but they receive counterfeits instead. If both parties knowingly buy and sell counterfeit cards I don’t have any problem with it.

In addition to counterfeits not being tournament playable, they are not collectable either. It feels good to own/play cards which are rare, valuable, and a part of MTGs history.

@"I imagine most people buying Yeazys don’t have an authentic pair to compare with." — that's right! It's the position I was in, which is what I come close to mentioning in the article: it's why I made the app in the first place.

So even better than that would be a public guide where both the fake and the real are. That, plus somebody who's put in the hours to do a thorough job to explain the differences they've found.

@MTG - Somebody was just telling me the other day about these perfect (or 99% perfect) clones of Warhammer figurines. I didn't even know they can reach $1,000+ figures, but hey, with today's asset products, that doesn't surprise me.

Magic The Gathering, Pokemon games (not cards — we've covered a free guide on that), Warhammer — it seems like sky is the limit really. Whatever can be replicated and is worth $200+ will be replicated IMO

> I’m wondering how “counterfeit aware” payment processors (VISA, Mastercards, etc) are becoming?

A bit more! They trust our Certificate with less pushback these days, more than 2 years ago, when we discovered our Certificate can get people's money back. We guarantee the Certificate nonetheless, so if it doesn't get your money back from the bank or from PayPal, we refund the $60 you paid us.

I know you said payment processors, but it's the banks (exception: AMEX) that are responsible for that segment of the transaction, AFAIK — with chargebacks and what have you

But if there would be an easily integrable solution for banks/payment processors, I can see them moving vertically into that

The problem with counterfeit warhammer figures is that 99% of the players don't care much if its fake or not! Its going to be interesting how it pans out when normal 3d printing can become just as good as their sets.

My experience as a 40k player is that we are there despite GamesWorkshop and not because of them. If you want to play in-person then you will need to accommodate players that want to use customs or stand-ins (I declare this bottlecap to be a tank, sir) because the game is extremely P2W and unfriendly to experimentation otherwise.

The Pokemon community is like this as well. Everything happens on a bootleg website, partially because breeding and getting good stats is extremely time consuming, but also because the IRL scene is geared towards kids.

Not only do they not care, sources for quality counterfeits are actually a bit of a passed around community secret because gw is pretty quick to have them shut down. The counterfeits are quite a bit cheaper than gw for acceptable quality.

The bigger issue is that the good counterfeits can get PSA or BGS graded (either officially, or a fake slab). PSA guarantees that their graded cards are genuine but Beckett does not.

With an Alpha Black Lotus going for over $500K, it's only a matter of time before undetectable counterfeits exist.

I wouldn’t be surprised that within the next 20 years MTG counterfeits will only be detectable by lab tests (testing for ink and paper age, etc). If this happens providence and seller reputation will become a more common factor in MTG — much like in high end art and antiques. At the highest end (Power 9) seller reputation is already a factor.

Maybe they could put an EMV chip on the thing.

Nah, each card should come with an NFT.

NFT

I bought some proxies to use in different EDH decks. The quality of the fakes was actually better than the real ones (anyone who follows MTG will know what I’m talking about).

Using a microscope it was pretty easy to tell them apart, based on the different printing technologies making different and hard to replicate pixel patterns (I don’t know the printing equivelent of a pixel).

Each proxy was $2, and you get to pick what you want. At that rate it’s pretty close to the rate you’d get if you bought a standard booster pack.

I wonder if it would be feisable for games like Magic to put technology like passive RFIDs into the cards themselves. Assuming you could make it work, it would also have some logistical advantages (automatically submit decklist, automated deck legality checks, anti-cheat checks for sealed pools...)

What's the range on those? Surely someone could scan a booster box in a store before buying then (and know what rares are in the box)?

Well, you wouldn't know what those rares are. If you are Wizards implementing this, you would have the RFID be random digits, and keep a database somewhere to match <string of hexadecimal numbers> with "English STX Professor Onyx".

But it's a good point, the access checks on the database would be a nightmare to handle properly.

Yeah I just mean for your automatic sealed pools concept you need a way for {whoever runs the tournament} to be able to scan a pool, or a verify decklist, which means a 3rd party. Local game stores are not necessarily to be trusted this much - simply because they are in the best position to scan boxes (and in the past LGSs have done shady stuff like this when sets were mappable).

That’s why there needs to be a system like in passports - the rfid part is encrypted with the code printed on a card itself.

This way there is no way to decrypt RFID info unless one can see the face of the card.

(Almost) all of the expensive mtg cards were printed over 20 years ago. Refining counterfeit measures in newly printed cards does nothing to prevent counterfeiting of the old and valuable cards. Newer MTG cards do have holographic stickers which makes counterfeiting new cards more difficult, but almost all $100+ cards are from over 20 years ago.

You can order holographic stickers for a few cents each nowadays. I doubt they good the same challenges they did until a few years ago.

Using this image as an example:

https://bychgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/image-1-102...

What would stop a particularly clever counterfeiting factory from using this service as a 'check list' of things to change, to improve the authentic appearance of their work product? Seems like a bargain for the price.

There's even more info for them in any of the guides: https://legitcheck.app/explore-the-library/

e.g. for this very item in the screenshot, the guide is: https://legitcheck.app/guides/real-vs-fake-hermes-birkin/

Partly answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27090248

Partly answered by someone else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089111

Having never been in the market for such things, what price would the fake Hermes Birkin bag in the example URL typically sell for? Either on aliexpress or similar or in a domestic retail market in China? The fake certainly seems good enough to pass casual inspection from a distance.

Anywhere from $50 for a bad rep, $500 for something that looks pretty good, and ~$1,300+ for something that’ll pass for the real thing. (Source: wife is fascinated by the rep industry)

1300 is when you get scammed. Most likely the 500 already gets you near perfect replicas.

Adidas has unseen Chinese competitor that sells any Adidas made in any size throughout Europe. They advertise with Google but the webshop images are just a couple of pixels too small to do a decent reverse image search.

I think its simply not worth the extra effort.

Most people cant tell the difference between 90% and 99% close to original so they dont need to improve their quality to that point.

I say more power to them! I really don't understand why some fashion accessories are so darn expensive in the first place.

If all it means is that a few rich folks will feel bad because some poorer people have the same handbag as them at a party, I'm okay with that. They could probably do with being a little less materialistic anyway.

So you're saying that it's alright if people commit fraud, as long as it's in an industry that you don't much care about?

Not exactly. I just think the materialistic culture such products perpetuate does more harm than good.

the fakes are produced without any supply-chain transparency, so there’s no-one to pressure over using sweatshops, non-renewable materials, toxic production chemicals.

but hey, pretty bag is cheaper, that’s what mattered?

if you want to stop humans wanting the pretty bag at all, good luck. that’s a hiding to nothing, right there.

My extended family is responsible for manufacturing a selection of these "luxury" goods, for the official brands. Unfortunately, the supply chain is not quite as clean and ethical as you envisage... Sweatshops are involved in the production of the $20k bags too (or at least the subcomponents).

Well, I'm not claiming they are all ethical (although many are); I said that transparency provides leverage to demand improvement, and I'll double down on that by pointing out that real improvement has occurred through exactly these means in sectors from the rag trade to consumer electronics. So, that’s not an effective counterexample, quite the opposite: you’ve identified a specific case that activists could lean on.

This is how the world becomes a better place, through transparency enabled by authenticity. Pleas for for everyone to be less materialistic have never moved the needle one iota, but an appeal to ethics is a superficial measure that nevertheless has systemic consequences.

If you think designer handbags have any relationship to ethics or sustainability, guess again.

That may be true, but it still sidesteps the whole "they're committing fraud" thing.

It's not like LVMH or the glitterati that shop in the back room of an Hermés boutique are the ones who get hurt, either. It's the indie designers and the normal people who save up to buy something nice for themselves who pay for it.

Doesn't have to be fraud to be a good counterfeit. It could be sold honestly as a counterfeit.

I'm not a lawyer, but this just seems like a different kind of fraud - two parties knowingly engaged in a transaction involving counterfeit products, where the victim is the original designer rather than the buyer.

It's probably a trademark violation, and maybe copyrights and patents do depending on the specific facts, but I wouldn't call those fraud.

Legal interpretations aside, this seems like an xkcd 810 kind of problem!

Counterfeits are bad for consumers because they are often low quality similes with shoddy attention to details and cheap materials.

If the end result of this site is that counterfeits increase their quality control?

Well, it'll still be illegal, but at least I might be happier with half my Amazon purchases =]

For those interested: https://xkcd.com/810/

I don't think counterfeiter need a website like this to know what to change. They know what to change, they are probably way more expert on the thing they counterfeit than this website. The thing is, they don't need to improve it at all, that's not their market, they try to be cheap, that's their market.

One thing I couldn’t figure out by skimming through the article is who performs the actual authentication (checking if an item is counterfeit)? Is it the two founders? Do they have a team working on this?

We do as well, but it's not only us. So the answer is a team. We get help from others as well on authentications!

I still don’t really understand what this person is selling.

"that’s what we do — we tell people whether their item is fake or authentic. Not authentication as in login authentication"

Should've made it clearer - a mistake on my part.

So you know how there are fakes of Rolex, Nike, Louis Vuitton etc — some are scarily close. We make guides on how to tell the fake from the real item, with the best fakes.

We teach people (for free)

But we also have a service, if they want us to check it for them

Your blog post is a bit incomprehensible tbh. I did get it eventually, but I got a good bit into the article before I did. #1 issue for me is you say "writing order notes", and that doesn't make sense at all to me. "verifying whether products are fake or legitimate" would be a much better article title.

Yeah I had no idea what this was about and had to Google “Order Notes”, which also didn’t turn up much. Bailed on the article pretty quickly since I didn’t understand anything, assuming I wasn’t the target audience.

Hmm, okay. Too much in my own bubble with that notion then The 'order notes' is a field in any e-commerce store, where you (the store) can send the customer a message

Think: "your order has been shipped"

But we write it manually — "your item is authentic because X and Y" — that's our order note. And at the same time our service

What I tried to do with the title was show the scrappiness. Maybe even inspire some hackers to be scrappy or to look for something other than perfection first

Because if you're pitching to a VC that you're starting an authentication company for luxury items

And you'll claim that you'll use the WooCommerce 'order notes' section, you'd be laughed out of the room. And not like the Airbnb founders — without that second part of the story where you prove them wrong

I think the word “authenticity” is something that expresses what it is your team does that more people would understand. I think most people know what a certificate of authenticity is and it sounds like your service provides a digital, saas version of that.

Even after understanding that the service is about distinguishing fake from legitimate products, I still don't know what an "order note" is.

Hmm, okay. Too much in my own bubble with that notion then The 'order notes' is a field in any e-commerce store, where you (the store) can send the customer a message

Think: "your order has been shipped"

But we write it manually — "your item is authentic because X and Y" — that's our order note. And at the same time our service

What I tried to do with the title was show the scrappiness. Maybe even inspire some hackers to be scrappy or to look for something other than perfection first

Because if you're pitching to a VC that you're starting an authentication company for luxury items

Keep in mind the usual type of person that is here on HN. I was able to gleam what you are doing and how you are doing it the moment I started reading the first order note.

Hmm, okay. Too much in my own bubble with that notion then

The 'order notes' is a field in any e-commerce store, where you (the store) can send the customer a message

Think: "your order has been shipped"

But we write it manually — "your item is authentic because X and Y" — that's our order note. And at the same time our service

What I tried to do with the title was show the scrappiness. Maybe even inspire some hackers to be scrappy or to look for something other than perfection first

Because if you're pitching to a VC that you're starting an authentication company for luxury items

i've always wondered how this works, on antiques roadshow, etc. can't the manufacturers of the fakes simply take the course, learn the subtlties, and make better fakes?

I would like to think that as the quality of the work improves, it makes more and more sense to establish your own brand instead of duplicating the work of another entity. Of course it all breaks down if the faked brands aren’t making all that high a quality items.

Diminishing returns on perfection.

Presumably the perfect fake often costs too much to reliably manufacture.

Think of the randomness inherent in the microscopically unique features of the original and how you might emulate them reliably with a margin that still lets you compete with its luxury pricing.

Have you noticed anyone using your guides to make fakes targeted to fool your authentication? Do you keep a few clues secret just to be sure?

> Do you keep a few clues secret just to be sure?

Not really. We give away everything we have. As others've mentioned, fake manufcaturers get diminishing results by spending the extra $$$ to go from 95% to 99%

Whe anyway, as part of 95%, the exterior side is 99% done. The last 5 bits are interior details unseen by anyone but the wearer

All they care about is selling more products to fake wearers. And fake wearers care only about exterior

My understanding is that some of the "fakes" for high-end fashion are due to multiple factories building products to the same specifications, but only the first one to deliver them gets paid. The others are still built to the exact same specification, and are functionally identical except for the logo. Is my understanding correct, and does your service distinguish between "fake because it isn't officially blessed" and "fake because it uses inferior construction"?

I tend to see the following categories overall, and while I'm not at all interested in the label/authenticity side of things, I have a difficult time identifying well-constructed or poorly-constructed household items.

* Real label, high quality. Good to have, but much more expensive than I can usually justify.

* Real label, low quality. Typically when a brand has just been bought out, and is trying to cash in on a reputation while using cheaper construction.

* Fake/knock-off label, low quality. Trash, masquerading as a good deal.

* Fake/knock-off label, high quality. The absolute sweet spot, getting the higher quality build without needing to pay for the social "authenticity" of the brand label.

It's more like this: A company contracts with a factory, they want 100,000 pair of shoes. The factory however is going to make a million or keep making it until there's no one to buy it. These are called "ghost shift" goods which is the bulk of counterfeits. If the product is not a limited run and still being produced the quality will be exactly the same. If the original manufacturer is no longer purchasing then the factory will very likely use cheaper materials.

The brands know this happens, they really don't care, what the brand will do is send a couple workers to the factory to be QC buyers. The factory makes a million items, and the QC workers will go through and pick out the best 100,000. The other 900,000 will be sold in the the developing world. The brand will typically take the 100,000 then send them to the US or Europe to another factory where they will have tags sewn in them and possibly some more labels or insignia attached. If it's a particularly premium brand they will add some secret identifying marks that even this LegitCheck website is unlikely to know about.

Those secret marks are typically for extremely high end goods that have lifetime warranties etc and the only time it's checked is if you send it in for warranty work.

A LOT of these goods are completely indistinguishable and will even make it into the retail supply chain. Particularly at stores like TJ Maxx, Bealls, and Ross et al. Though they go through a series of distributors that will basically only exist for a few shipments to avoid liability after some previous large lawsuits.

Ross and Burlington will also knowingly buy the ghost shift goods but keep them unbranded and sell them in stores with no labeling at all. You can find these clothes and they will have a tag sewn into that has a lot number. You can take that lot number and put it in to import manifest search engines and find out what brand was also importing them.

This would be where you find your coveted Fake / Knock off high quality with the best success.

See https://legitcheck.app/

The headline doesn't help much. They are doing more than "writing order notes". It's a service to check whether an item (watch, purse, designer clothing, etc) is counterfeit, divided into 3 use cases:

-You’re about to buy an item and you’re not sure whether it’s authentic or not

-You’ve already bought an item and you don’t know if you’ve been scammed

-You’ve been scammed and you want to get your money back

Yep, correct!

We do more than writing order notes in the sense that we now have:

* A Price Comparison tool

* A SaaS for resellers (that sucks. we need to fix it)

* A lot of words written on public guides

* We just started a video library

But ultimately, the bread and butter is our service. And the workflow is:

* People place an order

* We handle it by replying to them via order notes

No offense, but you seriously need someone with some business and sales expertise to help you.

While that may be your workflow, that is almost never what any customer cares about or makes decisions based on. What they care about is how you are going to help THEM, by how much, and at what cost. The actual workflow is rarely even secondary, it usually the last step/usage thing post-buy decision for the vast majority of people.

You do realize he is making almost $200k profit. I think he knows what he is doing

Not if he could be making half a billion if he could articulate what he does?

The thread and feedback/discussion is clearly helping, as he’s getting a lot clearer on what he actually does and what the value is.

But my point stands. With someone who has business and sales sense, he could be doing dramatically better.

No offense taken! Especially since you're right

We are a scrappy company and we're looking to mature, given the figures we've done the last year. I'd love to know if you'd still have the same opinion after going through our customer workflow

(since yes, what we've discussed is our internal workflow)

I wasn’t able to find a way to your customer experience/UI workflow the first time I read the article (which is odd - you have some words that seemed to clearly be intended to be links to it, but they were dead to me). Second time, I just went to your footer to your holding company, and was able to figure out the actual product from the list there. I didn’t download it though. I also figured out that some of your links ARE live, just not the ones I expected, and will take me to the app. Despite being interested at the beginning, I lost momentum and stopped.

You clearly have a viable product, and have already started doing some solid sales despite having no sales (or marketing) expertise - which is great, and you’re in an awesome place!

The next challenges are finding and scaling more ways to reach customers, conveying the value you can provide them in a way they can understand at scale, and converting those ‘take my money!’ potential folks into actual orders. Then executing on them at scale, of course.

The sales and the execution side are separate sets of expertise. Managing people from those backgrounds to get what you want is also a challenge for most execution/technical founders. Most folks with your background and having done what you have, will be quite comfortable with the execution side and people who also like it.

If you think of it as a computing system, you’ve got a great 32 core machine with an awesome GPU and 32GB of memory. You’re bottlenecking on the 80’s era Amiga tape drive you somehow managed to boot off of.

If you get yourself even a halfway decent 20GB drive from a decade+ ago, you’ll be doing leaps and bounds more business. If you find a modern SSD, even more.

There are a number of books out there for how to do sales as a technical founder, I can try to dig one up if you’re interested.

You're clearly having some experience, if not lot

Is there any chance I can get your mentorship over a vid call? No commitment for more

The 32-core, 32 GB of memory made sense to me

EDIT: Just to not risk losing this in a not-seen-HN-reply — if yes, let me know where I can reach out, or my Twitter is this: https://twitter.com/chddaniel

From what I can see in the thread, you’re smart, you obviously have a solid sense of what customers need (product wise) and ability to execute on it, you’re motivated, you don’t put up with BS, and you can listen to harsh but accurate criticism - you’re going decently far regardless, in my opinion.

You’ve also found a decent product with a clear market need and have turned it into positive cash flow. That is the start of something that can be leveraged very well if you know how to do it.

I’m just taking a wild guess here - take what’s useful and please ignore the rest. I don’t know you.

What may be helpful is realizing that much of what got you here may be getting in the way of getting you to the larger opportunity.

For one, being no BS means you may be neglecting good opportunities to get exposure and business because it feels fake. You may not be aware of the business models of the people who build large audiences or how to leverage them, of the influencer or advertising markets and tools for instance. I think you have some opportunity if you get someone clever who specializes in it. But first you need to find out someone who knows that that looks like, or iterate and learn yourself.

Your being locked into the product and able to see through bs may also be stopping you from truly understanding the mindset/awareness of the bulk of users (and their general lack of knowledge), in a way that you can clearly reach them. Knowledge of actual capabilities and the full system can be a real curse in selling, because it makes everything too complicated and makes it hard to understand where 99% of your potential customers will be - which is complete ignorance of you, your product, and the space.

And you have to make it easy for them to give you money, and use every opportunity you can to show your product and how it helps people, or you’re wasting visibility and leads you’ll never get back. This thread is obviously helping you, and I never cry over the past. Future posts could be even better (and get you more revenue) with a bit more work on some very minor (time wise) details.

I did make a prior employer a bit under half a billion ARR by identifying the need for, starting, and then leading an effort that fixed some similar (but not as severe from what I can tell) challenges for one of their products. This was from within Engineering as an Engineer and later senior Eng leadership. They did have a more established product and presence.

Unfortunately, I am also busy getting my third startup moving and this week and next are not great for taking on anything new.

A friend of mine who is very low BS and has given me some useful (and brutally direct) feedback that I’ve personally found invaluable is Naeem Zafar [https://www.naeemzafar.com/]. He’s done a lot of books and classes on various elements (mostly so he doesn’t have to keep repeating himself). I’d be curious what you learn if you go through the 7 Steps to a Successful Startup ebook. It’s only about 30 pages, quite to the point, and $10.

It may help you structure some of what you have now in a way that may point out the gaps in the skill sets on your team and the structure that could help you. It may not.

I don’t really use Twitter, but I’ll put it on my list to reach out in a couple weeks and see if any of this was helpful. I’ll make sure to mention this thread.

Best of luck! Making a viable business is one of life’s greatest challenges and you’re showing good promise.

Just bought the book! https://share.getcloudapp.com/Jru4YK1o

Starting to read it.

> I don’t really use Twitter, but I’ll put it on my list to reach out in a couple weeks and see if any of this was helpful. I’ll make sure to mention this thread.

Please do! Can I get your contact in any way? Would really hate to let this connection slip

Everything you've advised made sense, though I've got more questions (and curiosity/hunger for knowledge). Despite your precautions that it may not apply to me, some parts do apply really hard.

Especially the bit with "For one, being no BS means you may be neglecting good opportunities to get exposure and business because it feels fake." — this problem has been at the top of my list for the last year, and only now I've started to crack at it, as I started building an audience on Twitter ( went from 190 → almost 1,000 followers in a month).

That said, I'd love to avoid some mistakes and gain some insight from somebody like you who puts it this way

I don't want to push too hard the video call bit for like right now, but at least keep the door open for a moment in the future

Chasing this as I really would love to get in touch!

Congrats on being on the HN homepage! :). I’m wondering tho - does this check if a website that claims to be selling something online is a scam or not?

Thanks a bunch ACME Corps! I see you everywhere lol

Nope, we don't check for that. Others might do but that's outside our area of expertise.

We pretty much authenticate what we ourselves have 'earned' the right to authenticate, by covering the item in a free, public guide first: https://legitcheck.app/explore-the-library/

Headline sounds like some get rich quick scheme but really the product being sold is a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise about product manufacturing.

Hmm, defo didn't meant to come across that way

In all honesty, the post got inspired by this HackerNews hall-of-famer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132

It sounded like an interesting story

As we leave our scrappiness behind soon, I thought some hackers would like to hear our (scrappy) story

We can restore the post but I'm not sure what an accurate title would be. What are some options for an accurate title? (Edit: I've pinched tyingq's from upthread for now.)

"I sell onions on the internet" is a fine HN title; it's unusual and intriguing without being overly sensational. "How I made $XXX per year" is not a good HN title; it's extremely common and $sensational $dollars are $sensational. But don't worry—it's far more important that the article itself be good!

Then it's my mistake — probably I spent too much time in the 'build in public' bubble which is all about the numbers, and I forgot to get myself out of that bubble

I'd change the title to "I authenticate items for strangers for a living" — but if that doesn't fit either, the current title is ok

Thanks Dan!

I've pinched your phrase for the title above, since the original was baity and probably provoked the flags. Thanks!

They are the product authenticators. You know people bring their antiques to the antique TV show and ask the antique authenticators to verify the authenticity of the items. It’s the same kind of service. Kudos for them to make a business out of it.

I don't know why this is flagged. It's a legit entrepreneurial story(We can't know if the the claims are true but the story is a legit one).

At first it was hard to understand what it is all about and sounded like get rich quick scheme but essentially it is about someone building a service to check the authenticity of physical items.

I actually found the writeup refreshing in acknowledging the luck (but also the hard work) behind the success.

Also unsure why it's flagged when I came back to comment after reading. The vouch button is also missing for me (or is that only for dead stuff? Not sure what the difference is)

Yep, I like the writing style too. Upvoted but don't know if this will help.

It takes a lot of upvotes to cancel out flags, unfortunately.

Hey thanks! I was curious to see if handling the topic of luck did vibe with people. Thanks for taking the time to mention this, as it's very valuable to me

It's true that the title was sensationalistic, and I'm the OP. I probably hang too much in the 'build in public' sphere where it's all about the numbers

I mean it'd obviously benefit me more if we kept the old title, but that'd be too much me, and too little for the community

Title got corrected and I'm actually grateful the post wasn't fully taken down (or that I wasn't banned)

EDIT: And thanks for the comment below saying u upvoted!

I flagged it originally because at a glance it looks exactly like a scam. I unflagged it after seeing people actually having a discussion about it and saying there's something to it.

Next product: a fake legit checker that produces legit-checker style prose to fool bank clerks into authorising refunds for non-fakes. This would solve the "having to pay for stuff" problem. Huge market.

could you expane?

You buy a pair of real shoes. You pay me to give you a certificate saying they are fake (even though they are real). You show the certificate and get a refund, and keep the real shoes.

Why do you think you would get to keep the fake? The store would want them to take back to their supplier as evidence.

I've been sent fake/copycat stuff via Amazon. Never had to return it for a refund.

Yeah, the bit I missed is why paying them 60 dollars for an official looking "I was scammed" certificate actually helps with the refund process.

Also, my next thought was that if you actually wanted to buy replicas, and were okay with gambling your money, it would be possible to buy the fake that pretends to be real, and then get refunded, you get a decent fake for free (minus risking your money).

I guess you'd need to create new accounts as the pattern would become obvious over time, but I like the idea of fakers, and platforms that don't prevent it effectively paying the price rather than dumb consumers, especially since it reduces the utility of online shopping for me.

What happens when a buyer disputes a counterfeit item with their "message" and the seller doesn't agree? It may be easy to differentiate with counterfeit shoes, but what happens with art pieces, books, collectors' items in general?

(My experience: I collect Harry Potter books. Signed copies were always faked, because it is "easy" to forge a signature. But lately I've been seen fake first printings. Some people buy 2nd or 3rd printings (way cheaper) and change the page with the bibliographical details, which is hard to spot. Other ones even printed the whole book, those are a bit easy to spot because a 25 years old book shouldn't look as new, but if you buy it online seeing only photos, you may get scammed after paying thousdans of dollars)

First edition Harry Potter books are worth thousands of dollars?!? I’m assuming that’s only in mint condition but wow.

First edition first volume was a much smaller print run than subsequent volumes.

So if I bought the first day it was available, that’s not necessarily first edition?

In the UK, it probably is. But it was relatively unknown at the time, so it would be surprising if you had.

First edition first printing of Harry Potter 1 from the UK was only 500 copies in hardback. That one fetched a recent record of 190.000 dollars. Paperback is expensive as well, from ranges between 2k and 10k.

Hardback US first printing is around 1k/2k too

> It may be easy to differentiate with counterfeit shoes, but what happens with art pieces, books, collectors' items in general?

We don't do art or books, but we do some collectors' items

> What happens when a buyer disputes a counterfeit item with their "message" and the seller doesn't agree?

We ourselves can help if the customer paid via paypal/credit card — we've got the service mentioned in the article, which gets people's money back with 99.9% success rate, which we also guarantee it (so if it doesn't get your money back from the bank or from PayPal, we refund the $60 you paid us)

But yes — if you've been scammed by a malevolent seller, they might even believe the 'message' (they themselves know the item is fake anyway) and not care to do anyhting

Thank you for answering!

So people are just paying for your opinion or do you have some sort of credentials?

I find it ironic that you are selling authenticity checks, and yet I can't tell if the check is authentic.

We do. B2B Partnerships, some big companies trust us, and ultimately, I thought of the academic world so as to prove the expertise (I'm the complete opposite of an academic)

* We write public guides (see: https://legitcheck.app/explore-the-library/) - we have about 1m words written on the subject * People are free to contest it. If we're wrong, we'll correct * The more other people link to our guides, the more we get... credentials, I guess?

> some big companies trust us

Can't the infosec community define and setup a "trust" network?

E.g. everybody trusts a number of people, and trust can be transitive (perhaps with weights). Hence when I read some review the network can compute a trustworthiness value. If the product turns out to be fake, the system can do a backprop and adjust weights. Etc. etc.

You're defo smart with what you're saying

But the challenge would then be to explain something like this to the average non-techie who's just buying some expensive sneakers because they're cool

Yeah, basically a chain of trust certificates like outlined by X.509. I think managing the chain of trust would be a pretty involved process.

I really admire your approach to this. Making guides should not only improve your credibility but also overall help reduce the market of fakes by reducing demand.

It's exactly what we aim for!

That's why we never considered charging for our guides, even something as little as $1 → The point was to allow people to inform themselves about fakes, with as little friction as possible

That way, if we bump the % of people who get scammed by even a few negative points, we'd still be happy for a positive contribution

This is great, very impressive that they've had such success with a scrappy 2-person business.

The hard part of success like this often seems to be finding an under-served niche where you have, or can easily gain, some expertise. If anyone knows of a guide or has advice for how to solve that problem, I'd love to hear it.

I'm glad this got a second chance, because I really think it's a brilliant idea.

I just have a difficult time seeing how it could be cost-effective, without being eye-wateringly expensive.

Being able to detect forgeries requires some pretty intense domain expertise, and that tends to come with a lot of experience and schooling. Those folks don't run cheap. Very often, you need specialists in each domain. For example, you can't have a fashion purse expert determining whether an "antique" firearm (where forgery is a big problem) is fake.

I'd assume the biggest value would be to contract with auction houses or appraisers, where the workflow would be familiar. With regular users, the workflow would be all over the place, and I could easily see the whole thing taking hours, because the user keeps sending cruddy photos in a tungsten light, so the color can't be judged, or the focus is off.

But I guess if it's really just sending links to Amazon listings, things are fairly "standardized," so a number of assumptions can be made.

Nonetheless, this is not my area of expertise, and the OP insists that it is a viable service, making a profit, so I must offer kudos.

I'm glad too and grateful for the second chance on the article!

> I just have a difficult time seeing how it could be cost-effective, without being eye-wateringly expensive.

We write the guides first, which 'earns' us the 'audacity' to claim we know how to authenticate. I thought of the academic world so as to prove the expertise (I'm the complete opposite of an academic)

* We write public guides (see: https://legitcheck.app/explore-the-library/) - we have about 1m words written on the subject

* People are free to contest it. If we're wrong, we'll correct

* The more other people link to our guides, the more we get... credentials, I guess?

> you can't have a fashion purse expert determining whether an "antique" firearm (where forgery is a big problem)

We don't really get that far, into firearms and the such. Currently we do sneakers, clothing, watches, bags and some collectibles (e.g. Pokemon Cards)

> I'd assume the biggest value would be to contract with auction houses or appraisers, where the workflow would be familiar

We've worked occasionally with some (e.g. authenticated a pair of $20,000 Jordans: https://legitcheck.app/certificate-of-authenticity/property-...

But mostly B2C, so it's a consumer-focuseed service

> But I guess if it's really just sending links to Amazon listings

The products we're authenticating are mostly 'asset products', so items that are $300+, most of the time sold-out, have some resale value over retail OR retain more of their retail value than usual items (think: Chanel items)

So the value is in the content of the guides. How do you write these? Do you get input from the manufacturers or other experts?

Fakes can be very convincing and genuine manufacturing processes can be very variable.

There is a great deal of information already available in their main lines of business with items of high volume, popularity, and resell value. A great example of all three would be the original set of collaborative releases between Nike and Off-White, called "The Ten." Many people have bought authentic pairs, and many, quite a few knowingly, have bought fakes. There is a large pool of information on the variability of both authentic and fake items. Often, experts can determine which sellers have factory sources in common, because the factories frequently do not sell directly to consumers.

People who know where this information exists, since it is frequently in a few different places, could read as much as possible and compile it into guides. My guess is that's what they have done, since it can be difficult to be an expert on everything. The bulk of their business probably also has to do with a small subset of the full market. I doubt they see many requests to authenticate, say, a pair of Carol Christian Poell drip sneakers, because they are low in volume and overall popularity. And sometimes the best source of information is rep makers and resellers, especially with pieces that are difficult to duplicate.

Fakes can be convincing, but they're frequently sorted into a couple tiers, and in some cases, fakes can only be spotted with a detailed examination of areas where the fakes are most likely to deviate from the originals. There is a fuzzy threshold for quality that is determined by the ability to identify these differences while someone is wearing the fake item.

> Being able to detect forgeries requires some pretty intense domain expertise, and that tends to come with a lot of experience and schooling

Does it really require that? Perhaps for some items expensive enough to have expert forgeries (like with artwork where sometimes you need to test the composition of the paint itself or x-ray the canvas) but I doubt that’s the case for the typical knock-off item where all you need are pictures.

Here’s how I would go about this if I, as someone who knows absolutely nothing about any of this, wanted to setup this kind of business.

First, I would search for images of popular items which have known knock-offs produced. Let’s say the Nike sneakers or the Louis Vuitton bag mentioned. I would gather as many pictures of the known, proven knock-offs as I could. Then I would find official images published by Nike and Louis Vuitton. Put the images side-by-side and it’s simply a matter of going through that children’s exercise where you spot as many differences between the two pictures as you can.

Then given all the differences I spotted, I would start writing up guides documenting all of what my rudimentary exercise discovered. Publish the guides to gain credibility and then participate in various forums where those products are discussed. Pump the free guides and get established as an authority, even though all I’ve done is use my eyes to spot differences.

Then, just as they wrote up, start offering to check people’s stuff for free. When it hits a certain volume, offer priority service, etc. Same playbook for that.

When you get an item you’ve never reviewed before — say, a Rolex watch — ask the customer to submit photos that exactly match ones that Rolex publishes (actually, you should always ask for matching photos to make the work 100% trivial). Rinse and repeat: spot the differences.

You may not find 100% of the differences but you can get close enough to authoritatively state if it’s a knock-off or not. If you hit a wall where you’re not sure if the Rolex is real or not, there are two options. If Rolex is amenable to this, send the images to Rolex and ask them if there are obvious signs of a fake. Then you’re just playing the middleman and if Rolex needs more photos to authenticate, relay that back to the customer. If they’re not, I’m sure it’s not too difficult to locate someone who you know has a Rolex. Or maybe partner with a jeweler and cut them in.

Hey, now it’s not just you anymore and you can claim you have a team of people performing authentications behind the scenes. Customers don’t need to know that your team is really just you and a buddy who can spot differences between pictures, plus occasional ad-how strangers, and maybe even the official companies themselves from time to time.

I’d be somewhat surprised if they didn’t do exactly what I described.

Do counterfeiters ever use your service to find ways to improve their impersonations?

I feel like it's not a knowledge problem to the counterfeiters, but more of how the economics work in counterfeits.

A lot of people are ready to pay for a 20$ bag on AliExpress and probably never seen how a real Louis Vuitton bag feels, so they don't see/feel the difference. Same thing for jewelries, watches, shoes, etc. You see a lot of fake Yeezy (for example), and you can probably get a similar enough shoe to the real one, but it'll cost 100-200$, and most people are not ready to pay this price for a "fake".

On r/repladies, I've seen girls pay 1200$ for "fakes" that are very similar to the real product, at a certain point that only a handfuls of people will see the difference.

/u/not-math put it perfectly in the reply

Sneaker counterfeiters generally don't care all that much about pass authentication checks. For shoes, and most clothing, they care more about time to market (getting their fake out before or near release date) and price point. If someone is wearing fake shoes, unless they're outlandishly fake (there were some hot pink fake yeezys I've seen more than one), you mostly likely won't be able to spot these imperfections from a distance. Also, unless you're in the niche you probably won't care if they're real or fake. I'd liken this to hanging prints of famous paintings; people like the look but might not want to shell out for a Picasso.

I work with shoes on a daily basis and have done/do auth checks.

Yeah unfortunately this is true. There are absolutely fakes that get passed through StockX/GOAT/eBay and even sneakerheads wouldn't guess. Some are even made on the same production lines with the same staff, etc, according to some people in the rep industry (yeah that's weaselly, sorry). I have disputed purchases when I got inauthentic items but they were fairly obvious.

Very interesting! Out of interest with say a 'super fake' Rolex, would it still be possible to tell if it's real/fake from only external photos of the watch?

I'm curious if they have or might reach a point whereby you'd need to open up the watch and look at the movement quality?

There is a spectrum of replica quality in the watch world. Some watches are very obvious to spot while others would be impossible to spot from a photo. There is also the concept of a frankenwatch: a watch that is a blend of original and non-original parts. Assuming the builder has done their research and due diligence with part selection, you would likely not be able to identify a frankenwatch from an original if they were sitting right in front of you. As a result, all watch exchange forums that I have visited have suggest that authenticity of a purchased watch be verified from a authorized dealer for that brand.

To expand on this, serious watch collectors will keep service records from authorized dealers as proof of authenticity. For example, many models of Rolex have “service” parts that differ from the parts originally used in the model. Pricing general follows the hierarchy: original parts > oem service parts > non-oem replacement parts. The pricing gap between each of those steps can be in the tens of thousands. So if eBay authenticates a Rolex as original and you later on find out it has some non-oem replacement parts, you’ve likely lost a significant amount of money on that transaction.

It's still possible!

It'd help us to open the watch, naturally, but we can still rely on pics. Make no mistake though — the watches can be 99.5% perfect, but (at least for the watches we're handling, which have high values) the compromise in manufacturing processes is spotted one way or another

It's worth pointing out that the discussion about replacing pieces of a fake watch with authentic pieces (making a so-called 'franken' watch, as rep watch connoisseurs call it) is a totally separate discussion

Short feedback: The phrasing in this message is a rollercoaster: https://bychgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/image-5.png

You have to imagine someone paid money for this and is eagerly awaiting a response. Queue "I got an e-mail!":

1) Green checkbox: So the item is legit?

2) "Good news!", so it must be legit?

3) "the item is 100% fake"

You should really consider changing the design and the tone of this message. People literally pay to get one answer so it should be the most obvious thing about the message.

I wonder if this is a good use case for deep learning. I am wondering if you rely completely on images or, in some cases, does it boil down to things that images cannot portray? Like texture, weight, flexibility, etc.?

Nothing that complicated. And it's not because I haven't explored that option

If anybody reading this is able to create something that can reach 99%+ accuracy in terms of authenticating items, I've (obvious in the post) got the distribution and the audience to sell this to — DMs always open if you've got something solid

Currently it's a fully manual process.

We have competitors claiming they're 'using AI' but it's a bullshit gimmick for the masses of users. Unless an 'AI' is having 99%+ accuracy, it's probably too risky to implement

I wonder what percentage of luxury goods are fake on Ebay? In my own experience, 100%. The sellers are not even apologetic - they take your return, issue a refund, and immediately relist the item.

Lots of fakes on eBay

They started efforts to curate that, but it's far from cleaning eBay 100%

What you're saying happens, more often than we wish it'd be the case.

That's why we never considered charging for our guides, even something as little as $1 → The point was to allow people to inform themselves about fakes, with as little friction as possible

That way, if we bump the % of people who get scammed by even a few negative points, we'd still be happy for a positive contribution

There is a similar publicly traded business - https://www.collectorsuniverse.com/

Isn’t providing an “authentication service” without the input of the original manufacturers legally precarious?

Seems unlikely. Why?

Auction houses do this routinely, since Thomas Chippendale died two centuries ago and can’t provide input.

It’s only problematic if you’re corrupt or incompetent and become a means to reinforce the fraud.

I don't fully understand this business and so it seems a little off to me.

You claim:

> An authenticator that has public, verifiable proof to their claim of expertise will be assigned to your order.

Can you please share some of that public, verifiable proof?

You are averaging $28 per order and you say you have a 'team' of experts to help you do authentication. Is an expert's time really worth so little that this price point is profitable? Or is authentication really that trivial to do?

You only track revenue and net revenue and not profit. You are getting around $200k in revenue per year. It would be very enlightening to know the costs of the team of experts and now much of that revenue is profit.

You seem to be running something like 6 other lines of businesses at the same time:

- Layered Ink, a new way to do digital writing.

- Price Unlock, a SaaS pricing tool.

- Synergy, something that helps with decision making.

- Dear Mom/Investor, writing up progress/financial number of your businesses for subscribers.

- LegitCheck Price Comparison, a tool to find the lowest prices

- LegitCheck Organizer, a reselling tool (without those unnecessary fees)

To do that many things well would be extraordinary.

Doing some brief investigation into your competitors, this industry seems to be full of companies putting forth an image that they are a large and respected team with real expertise, while further digging suggests they are one person writing their opinions of questionable value and calling them certificates of authenticity. Why should your users trust that you aren't another one of those companies?

You claim expertise in 91 brands. In order to truly be able to authenticate those, it seems like it would require a good amount of expertise and time. You claim:

> Real expertise, not self-claimed.

> Find out the truth about your item and either start wearing it proudly or we’ll help you get your money back. > Our expertise is backed by the 1,000,000+ words we've written on this subject.

but with all due respect, writing lots of blog posts is not a basis for 'real expertise' rather than 'self-claimed'. You could be an expert in authenticity for 91 brands (I have no idea), or you could be a rando on the internet regurgitating (mis)information found on the internet. Being good at something and getting noticed for talking about something a lot are different skill sets. Why should your users believe you have real expertise in all 91 of those brands?

Some very good questions in this post that I would have also liked OP to answer. For context, I run a marketplace (https://vendiapp.com) where we physically verify every product transacted on our platform. We are focussing on Phones and similar high value electronic products susceptible to fraud. And visual inspection is definitely not enough to detect fakes in this industry. Also, average cost of having external experts is more than $20. So, there is a need for deep tech and a great supply chain to make the unit economics work.

Why would you tell the world your business model?

Because I don't think the business model is something worth guarding. Or that if somebody else replicates it (they have), we have a lot to lose.

I do believe in moats, and I'm trying my best to see what moats I can build on top of what we have to 'protect' the business

I think you left out a crucial part. How did you develop the skill to spot a fake? The encyclopedic domain knowledge that you possess is the anchor of your business and the value you being to the table. How did you gain that knowledge?

Super cool! Thanks for sharing this though.

Honestly I just 'hamstered' all the material I could on the most popular items.

In the beginning, in those first 10 guides I mention in the article, I just curated all the splintered bits of info* from the internet into one mega-guide, and added what I found after analysing fakes

* bits of info from as little as a forum thread comment, lost on page 48, to a full-blown attmept at a guide that, to me, wasn't exhaustive enough

In time, it refined to partly what I did in the beginning, and partly our own research which got better with exercise

Package all that info in a free, properly formatted guide (with some imperfect English, I admit, as we're not natives), and that gives us the traffic figures I screenshot'd

The moat seems to be the actual expertise.

See one of their guides: https://legitcheck.app/guides/fear-of-god/fake-vs-real-nike-...

There is a lot of niche FB groups who know their products/hobbies.

I was just about to drop FB, but the groups are handy.

Right, it looks their business model is actually

1) Becoming the world's leading expert on a topic

2) Share and spread that knowledge, until you have publicly cemented your place as an expert

3) Start charging for services that require usage of your expertise

OP here.

A pretty fair model if you ask me! I think generally we move more towards that model as the internet progresses

To me, before starting this, it looked like all the ones who made a noticable bump did it this way. It's why we hate Instagram gurus, I'd say

could you write a post on how exactly you became so knowledgeable in telling fakes from authentic items?

I wouldn't know where to even start... what happens when you get a request for an item that you've never seen before?

> what happens when you get a request for an item that you've never seen before?

Just refund and try to make up for the discomfort (money's blocked for the customer for a few days) by offering a voucher — we tell them "we still owe them a perfect experience"

> could you write a post on how exactly you became so knowledgeable in telling fakes from authentic items?

Sure! Copying below from another answer

Honestly I just 'hamstered' all the material I could on the most popular items.

* bits of info from as little as a forum thread comment, lost on page 48, to a full-blown attmept at a guide that, to me, wasn't exhaustive enough

In time, it refined to partly what I did in the beginning, and partly our own research which got better with exercise

Package all that info in a free, properly formatted guide (with some imperfect English, I admit, as we're not natives), and that gives us the traffic figures I screenshot'd

Looking at the link above each of the posts is so full of keywords, it's almost blogspam at that point.

Reading their guide, for example, on Rolex is painful:

https://legitcheck.app/guides/watches/rolex/genuine-vs-repli...

What's to protect? There's no secret. You send them pictures and money and they tell you if it's fake or not. There's no secret sauce beyond their personal knowledge.

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