My service to check whether an item is counterfeit or not

Counterfeiting is becoming a real problem in Magic The Gathering. Just this past week I received a counterfeit card in an order from a reputable business. Once you start buying expensive MTG cards you need to know how to spot a counterfeit in order to protect yourself. Luckily with MTG cards the printing process is the same with cheap cards and expensive cards so you can easily compare the cards for differences. I imagine most people buying Yeazys don’t have an authentic pair to compare with.<p>I’m wondering how “counterfeit aware” payment processors (VISA, Mastercards, etc) are becoming? It seems like counterfeits are only going to become more frequent in the future and payment processors should have some awareness of counterfeits when investigating a chargeback claim.

Using this image as an example:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bychgroup.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;image-1-1024x1012.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bychgroup.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;image-1-102...</a><p>What would stop a particularly clever counterfeiting factory from using this service as a &#x27;check list&#x27; of things to change, to improve the authentic appearance of their work product? Seems like a bargain for the price.

One thing I couldn’t figure out by skimming through the article is who performs the actual authentication (checking if an item is counterfeit)? Is it the two founders? Do they have a team working on this?

I still don’t really understand what this person is selling.

I don&#x27;t know why this is flagged. It&#x27;s a legit entrepreneurial story(We can&#x27;t know if the the claims are true but the story is a legit one).<p>At first it was hard to understand what it is all about and sounded like get rich quick scheme but essentially it is about someone building a service to check the authenticity of physical items.

Next product: a fake legit checker that produces legit-checker style prose to fool bank clerks into authorising refunds for non-fakes. This would solve the &quot;having to pay for stuff&quot; problem. Huge market.

What happens when a buyer disputes a counterfeit item with their &quot;message&quot; and the seller doesn&#x27;t agree? It may be easy to differentiate with counterfeit shoes, but what happens with art pieces, books, collectors&#x27; items in general?<p>(My experience: I collect Harry Potter books. Signed copies were always faked, because it is &quot;easy&quot; to forge a signature. But lately I&#x27;ve been seen fake first printings. Some people buy 2nd or 3rd printings (way cheaper) and change the page with the bibliographical details, which is hard to spot. Other ones even printed the whole book, those are a bit easy to spot because a 25 years old book shouldn&#x27;t look as new, but if you buy it online seeing only photos, you may get scammed after paying thousdans of dollars)

So people are just paying for your opinion or do you have some sort of credentials?<p>I find it ironic that you are selling authenticity checks, and yet I can&#x27;t tell if the check is authentic.

This is great, very impressive that they&#x27;ve had such success with a scrappy 2-person business.<p>The hard part of success like this often seems to be finding an under-served niche where you have, or can easily gain, some expertise. If anyone knows of a guide or has advice for how to solve that problem, I&#x27;d love to hear it.

I&#x27;m glad this got a second chance, because I really think it&#x27;s a brilliant idea.<p>I just have a difficult time seeing how it could be cost-effective, without being eye-wateringly expensive.<p>Being able to detect forgeries requires some pretty intense domain expertise, and that tends to come with a lot of experience and schooling. Those folks don&#x27;t run cheap. Very often, you need specialists in each domain. For example, you can&#x27;t have a fashion purse expert determining whether an &quot;antique&quot; firearm (where forgery is a big problem) is fake.<p>I&#x27;d assume the biggest value would be to contract with auction houses or appraisers, where the workflow would be familiar. With regular users, the workflow would be all over the place, and I could easily see the whole thing taking hours, because the user keeps sending cruddy photos in a tungsten light, so the color can&#x27;t be judged, or the focus is off.<p>But I guess if it&#x27;s really just sending links to Amazon listings, things are fairly &quot;standardized,&quot; so a number of assumptions can be made.<p>Nonetheless, this is not my area of expertise, and the OP insists that it is a viable service, making a profit, so I must offer kudos.

Do counterfeiters ever use your service to find ways to improve their impersonations?

Very interesting! Out of interest with say a &#x27;super fake&#x27; Rolex, would it still be possible to tell if it&#x27;s real&#x2F;fake from only external photos of the watch?<p>I&#x27;m curious if they have or might reach a point whereby you&#x27;d need to open up the watch and look at the movement quality?

Short feedback: The phrasing in this message is a rollercoaster: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bychgroup.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;image-5.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bychgroup.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;image-5.png</a><p>You have to imagine someone paid money for this and is eagerly awaiting a response. Queue &quot;I got an e-mail!&quot;:<p>1) Green checkbox: So the item is legit?<p>2) &quot;Good news!&quot;, so it must be legit?<p>3) &quot;the item is 100% fake&quot;<p>You should really consider changing the design and the tone of this message. People literally pay to get one answer so it should be the most obvious thing about the message.

I wonder if this is a good use case for deep learning. I am wondering if you rely completely on images or, in some cases, does it boil down to things that images cannot portray? Like texture, weight, flexibility, etc.?

I wonder what percentage of luxury goods are fake on Ebay? In my own experience, 100%. The sellers are not even apologetic - they take your return, issue a refund, and immediately relist the item.

There is a similar publicly traded business - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.collectorsuniverse.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.collectorsuniverse.com&#x2F;</a>

Isn’t providing an “authentication service” without the input of the original manufacturers legally precarious?

I don&#x27;t fully understand this business and so it seems a little off to me.<p>You claim:<p>&gt; An authenticator that has public, verifiable proof to their claim of expertise will be assigned to your order.<p>Can you please share some of that public, verifiable proof?<p>You are averaging $28 per order and you say you have a &#x27;team&#x27; of experts to help you do authentication. Is an expert&#x27;s time really worth so little that this price point is profitable? Or is authentication really that trivial to do?<p>You only track revenue and net revenue and not profit. You are getting around $200k in revenue per year. It would be very enlightening to know the costs of the team of experts and now much of that revenue is profit.<p>You seem to be running something like 6 other lines of businesses at the same time:<p>- Layered Ink, a new way to do digital writing.<p>- Price Unlock, a SaaS pricing tool.<p>- Synergy, something that helps with decision making.<p>- Dear Mom&#x2F;Investor, writing up progress&#x2F;financial number of your businesses for subscribers.<p>- LegitCheck Price Comparison, a tool to find the lowest prices<p>- LegitCheck Organizer, a reselling tool (without those unnecessary fees)<p>To do that many things well would be extraordinary.<p>Doing some brief investigation into your competitors, this industry seems to be full of companies putting forth an image that they are a large and respected team with real expertise, while further digging suggests they are one person writing their opinions of questionable value and calling them certificates of authenticity. Why should your users trust that you aren&#x27;t another one of those companies?<p>You claim expertise in 91 brands. In order to truly be able to authenticate those, it seems like it would require a good amount of expertise and time. You claim:<p>&gt; Real expertise, not self-claimed.<p>&gt; Find out the truth about your item and either start wearing it proudly or we’ll help you get your money back. &gt; Our expertise is backed by the 1,000,000+ words we&#x27;ve written on this subject.<p>but with all due respect, writing lots of blog posts is not a basis for &#x27;real expertise&#x27; rather than &#x27;self-claimed&#x27;. You could be an expert in authenticity for 91 brands (I have no idea), or you could be a rando on the internet regurgitating (mis)information found on the internet. Being good at something and getting noticed for talking about something a lot are different skill sets. Why should your users believe you have real expertise in all 91 of those brands?

Why would you tell the world your business model?