I find it interesting that this research seems to be (at a glance from reading that first page of the thread) coming from someone who owns some of these fraudulent cards (and could have just re-sold them and kept their mouth shut).
The police found it very difficult to investigate because no-one wanted to have paintings they had spent money on to be discovered to be fakes.
The forger was given community service, changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi
But he didn't change his name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibri#In_crime_and_politics
I feel like I remember the topic having its own list article but can't find any trace of it.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
One of my favorite examples is Gibson replica guitars with period-accurate serial numbers, but the serials are intentionally stamped during the wrong step in the painting & finishing process to signal that they weren't assembled at a Gibson factory.
His heirs probably won't be so forthcoming.
Edit now that I’ve read the article: I appreciate that it appears that the museum wasn’t dismissive of the claims and verified the forgery with their own analysis. But the original article was posted on the museum’s website, so who knows.
I remember he did a pretty cool recreation of the gun from Blade Runner at least.
Of course, Etsy is probably the main platform to sell these, and it's full of copycats so anything that looks like it could make money will quickly have cheaper made duplicates flood the market. And not just Etsy, inventions like the fidget clicker box and -spinner saw the might of Chinese manufacturing and drop shipping spin up almost overnight and flood the market with them.
If you kill Santa Claus, you must become Santa Claus!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Tetro
Pretty close to this story, which may have exaggerated a few things.
A classic case is when an heir discovers that one of grandfather's badly preserved paintings is on the side. If it's not restorable, a new painting is made and reintroduced to the market in place of the old one, which is destroyed. The new painting benefits from all the traceability of the old one. Many experts are not fooled, but they don't get a commission if there's no sale, and nobody wants to have proof that their painting is worthless.
Fakes are only revealed when their number affects the quotation and sale. As long as everyone's making money, no one really cares.
So if this stirs up a large controversy, it might actually make the fakes, especially the signed ones, collectibles as well. Probably never the value they first had, but I hope the wistle blower can recover some of his losses.
I'd agree that original prototypes would be cooler and more exclusive, but these cards are also unique thanks to the events around them. They are not just any contemporary printouts
With legitimate prototype cards, you can have thousands of them retain value.
https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...
Hopefully that's not the case here, but it's definitely not just a "money to burn" thing..
For every tech/finance worker who made hundreds of thousands a year and could afford to casually drop $5k a month on “collectibles”, there was easily 10 people who clearly were not making that much money but compulsively spending it for short lived dopamine hits.
It was kind of sad.
The one that really stuck with me was a social worker who worked with sick children making minimum wage, and spent all her spare cash on our product.