Sports Memorabilia
There is a huge interest in sports memorabilia, and
sports-related items include signed commemorative photos,
baseballs, footballs, basketballs, pucks and jerseys. A Google
search of companies hawking these items comes up with almost 5
million businesses!
Some of the items on offer cost thousands of dollars.
Where there are so many eager and gullible customers, fraud is
sure to appear. A San Diego federal judge who recently sentenced
several sports autograph forgers to prison said, "Life, liberty
and the pursuit of the national pastime, has been undone". The
prosecution stemmed from an FBI investigation called Operation
Bullpen, which closed down a professional criminal organization
that forged and sold bogus autographs.
60 search warrants were served, more than 2 dozen people
arrested, and a warehouse with 10 million dollars worth of
forged merchandise was seized. The ring leaders received 3 years
in prison and forfeiture or assets to the IRS. Both current and
"vintage" items were involved. Any sports fan who has a signed
souvenir may now want to question its authenticity.
Phil Halpren, the assistant U.S. attorney who worked to
prosecute the forgers stated that fraud is so pervasive in the
sports memorabilia market that unless you personally see an item
being signed by the athlete, odds are greater than fifty percent
that it is fake. The most athletes most well-known the the
public are popular with forgers, too. Halpren said, "If you are
looking at a Mark McGuire signature, it's alost a guarantee,
99.9 percent it is a forgery." Certificates of authenticity can
be fabricated just as easily as the collectible item they
supposedly validate, so this is no protection.
Vendors are fighting back in an effort to maintain the integrity
of the market. Disney, which owns ESPN, will begin next year to
auction signed sports memorabilia online. Disney says it will
authenticate the signatures with holograms encrypted with the
item's identifying information and package seals, videotaping
the entire process.
Sophisticated forgers can even produce holographic seals which
appear, on casual inspection, to be real. However most forgers
are amateurs, and the more sophisticated the anti-forgery
system, the less likely criminals are to attempt to copy it.
Baseball and football are most popular in America, but a few
famous hockey players such as Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr are
popular targets for forgery as well.
With all the items available, both off and on the internet, fans
can avoid a lot of fraud by using common sense. For example, a
baseball autographed by Babe Ruth selling for $500 is obviously
a fake, because such a price is unbelievably low, too low for
real market conditons. Also, it pays to know a little bit about
the development of baseballs and pens. If you see baseballs
supposedly signed in the '20s and '30s with Sharpie pens, these
are obviously fake, because these pens were not invented yet in
that era. To quote Phil Halpren : "I have seen Babe Ruth balls
signed on a Bobby Brown American League President ball. So, you
know, he was president in the early '80s. That's impossible to
have been done. But someone did it."
So, while it's enjoyable to own a piece of sports history, the
motto to follow is : buyer beware. Unless you are a professional
trader who knows how to authenticate merchandise, don't buy an
item strictly for its potential resale value, because you may be
disappointed by what you eventually get for it. Buy an item you
personally like and intend to keep, and don't spend thousands of
dollars. This ensures that you will be happy when you look at
your purchase, without the lingering doubt that you have wasted
a large sum of money on something of dubious value.
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