Beckett autograph authentication

[crxtreasures]

For those of you who read our previous post about authenticating autographs through Beckett, we have an update.  We ended up sending in 8 items and sadly only 2 of them were deemed authentic.  This was quite surprising because we really thought they were legit.  The issue now is what to do about the items that were not authenticated.  How can we list these and accurately describe them to a  potential buyer who may be interested in the item simply for the item itself and not the signature?  Saying right out that Beckett did not find them authentic does not seem a wise idea.  Any help on how to do an accurate description of these unauthenticated items would be greatly appreciated.

[crxtreasures]

Well, Chris gets all these items from auctioned storage units.  Sometimes it's difficult to get information about the items before I list them.  In this case we thought everything looked legit so we took the risk to have them checked.  Unfortunately it didn't turn out as planned.  Our question now is what to do with the "fakes".  We can't go back to the original owner because we know nothing about them or where they got these things.

[murphy71605]

Probably not what you want to hear but the honest and ethical thing to do is destroy the items.

Sockmonkey: Sorry, that post was not intented directly at you.

[crxtreasures]

Good one.  Knowing how some of these rock stars live, I doubt many of them even remember signing their name to anything the next day.  You could show them their own autograph and they could deny they did it.  I'm incuding photos of the "fakes" in case anyone is interested.

[crxtreasures]

I'm trying to send more pics but I'm getting a message that they're too large.  Oh well.  Here's what I can send.  All opinions are valued greatly.

[crxtreasures]

Here's what we got from Beckett.  Six identical form letters for every item.

[bubbleman2010]

The items without signatures are worth just a few bucks the signatures are the money shot but since they are fake they are now just defaced 2 dollar merchandise. Your looking for angles to try and recover the bulk of your investment and ebay is the wrong venue to do the as is how is where is no refunds no returns...

[coolections]

I can tell you without a doubt that the KISS autos are fake. Not sure about those other people but since the KISS ones are fake I would assume the others are too.

[crxtreasures]

In your opinion, what makes these fake?  They look a lot like other examples we've seen.

[coolections]

I have the real deal and they are nothing like yours.

[a_c_green]

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@crxtreasures wrote:

In your opinion, what makes these fake?  They look a lot like other examples we've seen.

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In my amateur opinion, they all appear to have been made by exactly the same slightly-tired Sharpie (notice the fading in the middle of the strokes) and with the same hand. Notice the near-identical swooshes of the Dollar-sign "S" in "Simmons" and the "P" in "Peter," as well as how the first "e" in "Peter" is virtually identical to the "e" in "Ace." (The wobbly "P" on "Paul" suggests that someone realized at the last moment that they'd better start doing some different styles of capital letter strokes.) The fact that all seem to have their names pretty carefully spelled out is also not something that seems likely when scribbling the 200th autograph of the day. 

[crxtreasures]

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation, very helpful.

[bubbleman2010]

The G in Gene isn't even close to his real signature. The lure of easy money always clouds folks judgement god built greed into all of us some can control it some can't...

[crxtreasures]

Chris seems to think we can list the matted & framed magazine covers with a description that says the signatures are fake.  He thinks there's a KISS collector who would want the magazine covers anyway even though the autographs aren't real.  I personally don't think that's such a good idea.  I believe we'd be better off covering the signatures and just selling them as magazine covers.  I'm sure there's a collector out there somewhere that would want them without the autographs.  Any opinions?

[bubbleman2010]

Matting and framing is just tossing some more good money down the rathole. Toss them in the trashcan or a kind of fun thing to do is leave them sitting at MacDs on a bench and see how long it takes them to surface back on ebay. I always like the sellers stories as to how they were discovered..... I used to leave my old junk mavicas in the park and within a few days read what a wonderful camera it was,just no longer needed..

[crxtreasures]

We got them already matted but he did purchase frames.  The signatures are on the mat so can easily be covered.  Probably better than trying to get the cover off the mat without damaging it.