The collectibles business runs on authenticity. 

Value depends on an item being what it is claimed to be.  

And some claims are easy to make. And easy to fake. 

Here are the seven most common scams to watch out for, and tips to avoid them. 

Forgeries

The most obvious, straightforward way to fool a collector is to counterfeit a valuable item. 

Forgery can make for a great story. 

But it’s not just fiction, it’s a real and present danger to any collector. And forgers have never had better tools - 3d printing, scanners, professional, fine art laser printers. 

Han van Meegeren's Supper at Emmaus. Perhaps a very good painting, but not by the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. 

Han van Meegeren was a wonderful technical painter, whose style was out of fashion in post-World War I Netherlands. He took his technique and knowledge and made some of the greatest forgeries ever, selling them for perhaps as much as $30 million. 

His works were still being discovered in reputable collections into the 2010s. 

And, he put an enormous amount of work into them. 

Most forgers don’t go to those lengths, or hope for those rewards. They’re looking for relatively quick, easy money, and can be defeated with relatively quick, easy checks. 

Both money and stamps have been forged as long as they’ve been around. 

The complexity you see in the designs of the money you spend or the stamps you stick on your letters has been put there to stymie forgers as much for its aesthetic appeal. 

Harold Treherne, the early 20th-century “Brighton forger”, started out putting overprints and surcharges onto genuine stamps to increase their value. He soon began to take advantage of relatively less sophisticated printing techniques in India (and a contact he had there) to produce wholesale fakes of stamps from that country. He was caught by a sting when his large orders of common stamps stirred suspicions. 

Misrepresentation 

Some forgeries aren’t really forgeries. 

There is plenty of room for legitimate replicas. Early stamp collectors filled spaces in their albums with facsimiles that were openly produced and sold - at a fair price - for that purpose. 

A US treasury official lets an autopen take the strain. Many official signatures are autopen, including US Presidents and British royals. As long as that's acknowledged when they're sold that's OK. 

It’s when a replica takes on a name, and a price, that it isn’t entitled to that we get a scam. 

In 2022, Bob Dylan’s book of essays on songwriters was sold with a limited edition described as “hand signed”. But they weren’t. Bob had used an autopen (in part because of Covid restrictions) and the publishers apologised and gave buyers their money back. 

Autopen is commonly used by busy people to sign documents or letters. 

Their use by US presidents is well known and occasionally the subject of controversy. Autopen (and human-made secretarial signatures) are legitimate administrative tools in most cases. 

But, when they are knowingly offered as what they are not, for a price they do not deserve, they are a collecting scam. 

Bait and Switch, and repackaging 

What you see isn’t always what you get. 

Bait and switch can be a very blunt force scam in the days of online sales: you’re shown a picture of something and you’re sent something else. 

There’s a particular issue in trading card collecting, where there’s a lively market in sealed packets of cards that may contain a treasured rarity. Their value lies in that chance. 

Which some scammers are taking from buyers by opening packs, extracting valuable rarities and replacing them with regular cards. 

One streamer (there’s a large live selling culture around Pokemon, for example) was caught out in November 2025 when they accidentally left their camera on while opening a pack they had previously resealed. They’d done a bad job, and their live-streamed anger at their error blew the gaff. 

Authentication fraud

This Jerry Rice shirt was listed by Mister Mancave so it's very likely not authentic. 

In a business built heavily on trust there is also a significant sub industry that sells it. 

Expertising, authentication and grading services are a vital part of the modern collecting scene. 

So they’re also subject to fraud and forgery. 

Sports memorabilia is known to be particularly prey to forgery. So, authentication is very important in the trade. 

In July 2025, a suspicious death in Indiana seemed to blow the lid on a huge authentication scam. Some of the claims made by Brett Lemieux of Mister Mancave as he called himself were probably overblown (did he really make hundreds of millions of dollars?). But, what is certainly true is that his scheme was successful in part because it didn’t just forge autographs, it forged authentication holograms. 

Authentication services are providing a high-quality service. And it’s that that makes their product worth forging. 

This includes the plastic slabs into which authenticated and graded items are often sealed. Slabs and authentication labels are now being forged (again, Pokemon is a popular target) with a high degree of sophistication. 

It’s another level of checking every buyer should be aware of. 

Reconstruction and repair 

Among the most treasured cards in baseball history, the T206 Honus Wagner is a tempting target for forgers and scammers. 

One of the most famous and valuable baseball cards of all time was altered to make it appear better than it actually was. 

The 1909-1911 T206 Honus Wagner is one of the all-time rarities of the hobby. 

There are fewer than 100 copies. Most of them are in poor condition. 

The first of those to be professionally graded got a superb 8.0 score. But, it owed that score to some sharp work with blades by William Mastro. After its sale for $2.8 million in 2007, Mastro pleaded guilty to fraud, and during the case admitted to trimming the card to clear up its ragged edges. 

Ironically, Wagners are so rare that this story has perhaps added value to the card that was once owned by hockey star Wayne Gretzky. 

Other repair jobs are unlikely to have that effect. And are often far cruder. 

Stamp forums are full of posts showing horrifying repair jobs, usually on low-value bulk buys. 

Trading cards are regularly revealed to have been chemically cleaned or inked to hide damage. 

Repair and conservation work done sympathetically and with honesty can be a vital part of preserving historic items. 

But when condition is key to value, for example on stamps where perforations need to be sharp, or margins equal, then hidden repairs that change the condition of the item from its state when it was produced or last used amount to fraud. 

Deconstruction and damage 

A detail of the Amarna Princess, made in Lancashire rather than Egypt. Image, Wikimedia Geni Shaun Greenhalgh.  

Sometimes good condition is a big driver of high prices. 

And sometimes age is. 

Shaun Greenhalgh is a sculptor. He made a statue in his garden shed near Bolton. 

That would have been fine had he not artificially aged it with “a mixture of tea and clay”, claimed it was Egyptian and started a process that ended with it on display in a local museum. 

The story of ancient arts, coins, and documents is littered with similar examples. 

Antiquity can be faked. 

There are circumstances in which a used stamp is more valuable than a mint, uncirculated one. US 1860 90c stamps are so desirable with a cancellation that experts advise never buying one without a certificate of authenticity. 

Market manipulation, auction manipulation 

Many of us are now buying our collectibles in online auctions. 

It’s always been possible to manipulate auctions with inauthentic bids. But perhaps it’s never been easier. 

And, genuine buyers lose out. 

There was probably funny business going on in Christie's 18th century sales, but the internet makes it very easy to be anonymous for bidding purposes. 

A well known online auction site acknowledges the problem with a policy specifically to deal with it:

“Shill bidding is when someone bids on an item to artificially increase its price, desirability, or search standing.”

Nevertheless, a 2009 study found nearly 2% of bids on an auction site were shill bids. 

There are fairly regular reports of issues around live-streamed Pokemon sales. 

And, our friend, Bill Mastro (of Honus Wagner card-trimming infamy) also ran a shill bidding scheme to push up prices on items sold through his auction site. 

It was part of the successful case against him. 

More broadly, there is now something of a backlash in the sports card-trading community against the whole culture of artificially created rarities. 

Baseball cards and the like were initially created as giveaways. A select few cards became valuable rarities in large part because the product was so little regarded. 

That’s the very opposite of the modern industry. While cards are still sold to kids who love sports, games, and so on, there’s a premium level that sells one-off issues as winning lottery tickets in larger packs of cards - will you pull the signed game-worn patch? 

These cards are often sold very quickly for huge figures. For example, a 2026 card for Arsenal player Max Dowman is already trading online for over $13,000. 

The way these cards are sold and resold is becoming controversial, and a card breaking site faces legal action in California for allegedly breaking laws on gambling over its practices. 

Stories and confidence tricks: the psychology of scams

A three-card monte game in 1940s Poland. A crowd has gathered because there's something attractive for sale - free cash. Cons and scams can be simple or sophisticated, but most sell a dream.

Stories sell. We love stories. It's a human trait. 

And the story of some collectibles is what makes them valuable. 

A 1960s Beatles album has little value. A Beatles album that is signed by a Beatle has a lot of value. A Beatles album that was signed by all four of the band with messages to the signee goes up another notch in value. 

Stories are attractive. And stories are at the heart of a lot of scams. 

There’s a lot of fascinating literature around the psychology of confidence tricks, which - as Wikipedia nicely summarises - “exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, irresponsibility, and greed.”

And the psychology of most of these scams works in a similar way. They use our very human weaknesses against us. 

How to buy collectibles safely  

Emotion and narrative are undoubtedly a big part of why you collect and what you collect. 

But you really need to turn off your heart and turn on your head as far as you can to buy collectibles safely. 

If you look at our list of scams above you’ll see some commonalities. 

They follow money, and volatile, potentially highly profitable markets. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was stamps. Today it’s much more likely to be Pokemon cards. Next it might be game consoles and video games. 

Markets that offer the potential for huge gains for low outlays (in reality a fundamentally unlikely prospect) are likely to attract naive and even desperate buyers who are more prey to scams. 

Education, information, wisdom, experience and good advice: pretty much every scam can be avoided with these. 

As most genuine collectors buy in areas about which they care passionately they will bring this to their purchases rather naturally. Make sure you don’t forget them when you see a once-in-a-lifetime buy at an unbelievable price. 

Use the most reputable sellers you can. If you’re shopping online, make sure you’re aware of the buyer protections on offer where you’re shopping (and know how you can raise hell if you need to). Demand provenance if its promised. And check everything you can. 

It’s possible to find some horrifying figures for the percentages of items (particularly sold on line) that are fake. It’s important to remember that the vast majority of people you’ll do business with in your collecting life are good, honest traders (and most of them are collectors like you). 

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your wits about you.