Carbon Copy Autograph Attempt with airSlate SignNow

Fax autograph human

Hi, I'm Steve Zarelli. Welcome to another episode of Collectibles Chat. Traced autographs have plagued autograph collectors for a long time. This is an old scam. But when you think about traced fakes, typically you think about the old-school light table. They put a piece of paper or an album page on top of a light table and then they trace the fake on to that. Those types of fakes are typically pretty easy to detect. They're slowly executed and it doesn't take a real trained eye to know that something's not right with them. However, the scammers have a new twist on this old scam. Anyway to separate you from your money... they're gonna try it. I want to tell you about this new twist on traced autographs and show you how you can identify them. Here's the play... This is what the scammers and crooks will do. They start off with an authentically signed photo or they can find a high-resolution image of an authentically signed photo somewhere online. So, they take that and they make a copy of it using a service like Shutterfly or go to Walmart and get an 8 by 10 print made of the actual signed photo. So, now the signature is part of the photograph, right. That's not going to fool a lot of people. It's just basically a preprint you look at it quickly and say wait a second... the inks not on top... it's it's part of the photo. That's not gonna scam a lot of people in all likelihood. But here's how they enhance it... by basically tracing over the printed signature with live ink. So now you have live ink sitting on top of that and you use the real signature underneath as the template. That's gonna fool some people. It's not going to fool a lot of professional authenticators but people who just kind of look at it quickly put it in a sleeve in a binder and don't think twice about it... it's gonna fool them. And quite honestly you're getting some eBay seller who shows the photo from 6 feet away or at arm's length... it might look okay because the shape is actually correct. But when you examine it up close, you're gonna see problems with it... done too slowly... there's issues. So, let me walk you through a couple of these so you know what to look for. Here's the first example: a Dave Scott signed photo. Now remember, how they're doing this. There's a printed signature underneath then they go over it with a marker to make it look like live ink. Let's take a close-up look... and there you go... you can see the printed signature peeking out from underneath the live ink. They didn't even really do a very good job. So, the shape is closely replicated, but you can tell it's just done too slowly and you can see the original signature peeking out. The printed signature underneath peeks out... they don't even cover it up very well. The forger got super ambitious with this Frank Borman... long inscription. The thing that first strikes you is when you look at this it looks way too shaky and wobbly. Even in his advanced age, Frank Borman signatures... I've never seen anything that looked this bad. He still signs pretty smoothly, so that's the first tip-off that something's wrong with this. And when you look at it much closer... Wow there you go. You can see the printed signature poking out from underneath the live ink in a number of spots. It's totally messed up right here ... didn't even cover it properly. This one is is pretty obvious to see that something is seriously wrong with it. It's not authentically signed. Unfortunately the issue is a lot of collectors buy things, they don't look at them very closely... they stuff them in a binder and it's kind of forgotten about and then it could be years later before you realize that you've bought a fake. Last, but not least, is my favorite. This train wreck of an Alan Bean. This thing is just a total disaster. You can see that the pen was just going so slow... like a half a mile an hour to carefully try to trace over and cover the printed signature underneath, which you can see is poking in various spots. Just a mess. In any case, if you find yourself with one of these things you need to demand a refund. Get your money back. Contact the seller as soon as possible. If you need a letter, that's something I can certainly help you out with. eBay has accepted my letter in numerous cases where there's disputes in terms of somebody wanting to return something for authenticity reasons. But, you know, quite frankly in most cases, these guys, if they're one of these pro scammers... they're not going to fight with you. They don't want to start piling up negatives. They're going to quickly and quietly issue you a refund. Because you've got your money back, you're going to be so happy you're not going to leave them a negative... and they're just gonna try and fob it off on the next buyer and hope that they're not as observant or as diligent as you were. Hopefully you've learned something in our journey through traced autographs. Thank you very much for joining me and check me out online on Facebook and at SpaceLOA.com. My name is Steve Zarelli and I provide professional authentication of astronaut cosmonaut and aviation autographs to auction houses, dealers and collectors worldwide. We'll see you again soon.