Stupid impulse bids. . . I’ve been looking on and off for George Bush autographs from the various Donruss and other releases. He is a former president, and he’s signed for trading cards — how cool is that? The last time I threw a bid out on one of Bush’s cards from 2008 Donruss Baseball I got beaten — badly, last night I tossed out what I thought was a low-ball snipe and totally forgot about it until I received a winning bid notification. I was really excited until I saw the seller had less than stellar feedback, and my heart sunk a bit when I read the negatives they did have. . . here are two of their three negatives:

Fake GAI Brett Fabre auto card Beware! No response!

this card is suspicious. That’s why he does private listings. Compare the auto.

So now, after bidding, winning, and seeing bad feedback I decide it would be a good time to take a close look at the card (STUPID!).

The B in Bush simply isn’t right. It is way too angular, and looks like it was done in 3 strokes of the pen. . . At this point I look at his other items for sale and notice a couple of forged American Pie autographs of Lou Ferrigno and Adam West. . .

I recruited my friends at Non-Sports Card Forum for some advice and many felt the card was questionable. Some Google searching for the guy’s id: takashimurakami didn’t really turn up anything useful, partially because the ID breaks down into two apparently common words.

Finally I searched on Blowout Card’s Forums and found a number of people pointing out fake sports card this guy has sold. . . I knew by this point my card was probably no good, thankfully I figured this all out before paying for it. I emailed seller asking if they guaranteed the card was authentic — their initial response was to send me an invoice requesting payment.

Artist Ted Dastick Jr pointed out on NSCF that the Bush card is numbered to only 25 copies — that was a really bad sign since I found 5 completed eBay sales for it — a card released in 2008 with only 25 copies made having that many recent sales is obviously fishy. At this point I called eBay asking for advice, and explained the situation to Kristy who called the seller. Thankfully after getting some heat from eBay the seller agreed to cancel the transaction. I did ask at that point if the card was numbered to 25 and pointed out that the American Pie autographs were fake. The only response was to accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist.

In my searching I did find some of these autographed Bush materials cards numbered to 250, a little bit of research shows that there were several versions of Bush cards that are very similar, including a relic card that was limited and numbered to 250, so people are getting the legitimate relic card and slapping a forged George Bush autograph on it and trying to pass it off as one of the versions that were limited to 25. Additionally some folks on NSCF pointed out that the legitimate version of this card says it is autographed on the back of the card. . .

Thankfully I got away from this card without too much trouble, unfortunately it’s still out there, and the seller says be plans on selling it to the 2nd bidder. I really wish eBay would step in, but of course they won’t. . .

Good luck out there!

Jon