Michael M. unfortunately has three gbapack cards in his collection, and as of now he’s determined they all are counterfeit. . .
Here’s the skinny on my Alyssa Milano Charmed: Conversations autograph card. It appears authentic (to my untrained eye). I see no obvious differences between my card and your scans, and my card has an easily-distinguished watermark.
Up until now I haven’t looked very closely at the autograph (i.e. under a magnifying lens). It looked good to the naked eye and the card is watermarked, so I felt fairly confident. To be perfectly honest, this card has been in my “to sell” pile for a while, and until recently I wouldn’t have had second thoughts about listing it. Well, I had second thoughts so I examined it again under a lens. That was (to me) inconclusive. There appear to be dots at the ends of the signature (i.e. autopen), but not blatant ones. Finally, I did some high resolution scans and that settled the whole question.
Yes, there are dots at the ends of each pen stroke, but here is the damning evidence: the autograph is signed backwards. The autograph is so crisp and clear, you can see the actual pen strokes. If you look carefully, you can see that “Milano” is signed first (starting correctly with the ‘M’). You can see that the ‘l” is superimposed by the ‘sa’ in ‘Alyssa’. If you look at the way ‘Alyssa’ is signed, you can see the tail on the final ‘a’ is superimposed by the second ‘s’. Perhaps most obviously, the strokes on the initial ‘A’ are completely reversed.
You have to look closely at the scan (the full scan sent to me is available here), but if you trace the outline of the A in Alyssa you can see what Michael is saying — it is indeed signed backwards.
I examined the card closely and noticed the autopen dots, as well as the offset Inkworks authentic foil stamp noted by Steve. I took Michael’s scan as well as a couple of scans that I have of known authentic Milano autographs, including one from Ink Vault and I drew lines on ‘em with photo editing software.
As a reference point I started with the ‘C’ in the word ‘Conversations’ in the Charmed Conversations logo at the bottom of the card. I lined all of those up horizontally with a black line. Then I drew another black line at the top of the ‘dots’ in the Inkworks Authentic foil stamp. As you can see Michael’s card (the card at the right) has a logo that is slightly lower than the other two, which line up perfectly. Vertically I started at outside of the right most dot in the Inkworks Authentic Foil stamp and drew a line down. The line crosses the ‘Charmed’ logos through the ‘d’ on the legitimate cards. On the counterfeit card that line falls between the ‘m’ and the ‘e’
Thank you very much to Michael for sharing his story about this card and helping out the community.
Jon
I originally suspected the Dushku was a fake when I saw how bold and perfect the signature was. I compared it to all of the Dushku’s I could find on eBay and none of them looked as bold as mine. Also here’s an auction that prooves it’s a fake, same exact signature: eBay item: 360221543215, Seller: whysteve.
I have been hoping to do a detailed analysis of these cards, but I haven’t been able to find the time, it’ll come at some point. Thank you very much to JerS86, hopefully this will have more field reports in the future, with any luck it’ll simply be alerts to eBay auctions, and not about cards that have already been purchased.
A couple of days ago Michael M posted a couple of comments on Webjon in the loveandnewyork thread. Michael had the misfortune of buying a Gillian Anderson autograph card from gbapack, so he had the right to be concerned. He compared his Anderson to some other cards, and here is what he found:
