Are Your Sports Memorabilia Faux Or…

Are Your Sports Memorabilia Faux Or…

There is enormous interest in sports memorabilia, and sports-related items encompass signed commemorative photos and baseballs, footballs, basketballs, pucks and jerseys. A search on Google for companies selling such items returns nearly 5 million companies!

Some of the items on offer are worth thousands of dollars.

And where there’s a multitude of ready and gullible customers, fraud always will emerge. That’s a San Diego federal judge who just recently sentenced several sports autograph forgers to prison, and added, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of the national pastime, has been undone.” The prosecution was the result of an F.B.I. investigation nicknamed Operation Bullpen, which put an end to a professional criminal enterprise that forged and sold fake autographs.

More than two dozen people were arrested, 60 search warrants were served and a warehouse containing 10 million dollars in counterfeit merchandise was seized. 3 Most of the ring leaders got 3 years in prison and forfeiture or other assets to the IRS. Current times and “vintage” objects were involved here. Any sports fan with a signed souvenir may now want to ask whether it’s real.

There is so much fraud in the sports memorabilia market, the assistant U.S. attorney who fought to bring the forgers to justice, Phil Halpren, said, you have better than even odds that something is fake unless you were there to watch the athlete sign it. The most-publicised athletes are the most popular with forgers, as well. “If you’re looking at a Mark McGuire signature, it’s 99.9 percent guaranteed it is a forgery,” Halpren said. Certificates of authenticity can be faked as easily as the collectible item they purport to authenticate, so this offers no protection.

Vendors are fighting back, desperately trying to keep the market honest. Disney, ESPN’s owner, will start auctioning signed sports memorabilia online next year. Disney says it will store data on the signatures inside holograms encrypted with the identifying information of the item as well as the seals on the packages, videotaping the whole thing.

Sophisticated forgers can even create holographic seals that look, at first glance, authentic. But most forgers are amateurs, and the more elaborate the anti-forgery system, the less likely criminals are to try to copy it.

Baseball and football are the sports most popular in the United States; however, a handful of well-known hockey players, including Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr, are also popular targets for forgery.

Given everything that’s for sale, off- and online, fans can protect themselves from a lot of fraud just by exercising common sense. So, for instance, a Babe Ruth-signed baseball offered for sale for $500 is on its face a fake, because the price is unbelievably low, lower than what we know is plausible in market conditions of reality. It also helps to know a little about the history of baseballs and pens. And if you see baseballs allegedly signed in the ’20s and ’30s in purple, black or red Sharpie pens, these are all obviously forgeries, because these pens were not even invented during that period. And to quote Phil Halpren : "I have a seen a Bobby Brown American League President ball signed by Babe Ruth." So he was president in the early ’80s. That could not have been done. But someone did it."

So as nice as it is to own a piece of sports history, the mantra to abide by is : caveat emptor. Avoid buying an item just for its resale resale value, unless you’re a professional trader that knows how to authenticateker said, because the resale price may be disappointing to you when you finally sell it. Purchase unless you love and plan to keep an item yourself, and don’t spend thousands of dollars yourself. This guarantees that when you look at your purchase, you will feel happy, not wondering if you threw away thousands of dollars on something with questionable worth.

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