Having never been in the market for such things, what price would the fake Hermes Birkin bag in the example URL typically sell for? Either on aliexpress or similar or in a domestic retail market in China? The fake certainly seems good enough to pass casual inspection from a distance.
Anywhere from $50 for a bad rep, $500 for something that looks pretty good, and ~$1,300+ for something that’ll pass for the real thing. (Source: wife is fascinated by the rep industry)
Adidas has unseen Chinese competitor that sells any Adidas made in any size throughout Europe. They advertise with Google but the webshop images are just a couple of pixels too small to do a decent reverse image search.
> what happens when you get a request for an item that you've never seen before?
Just refund and try to make up for the discomfort (money's blocked for the customer for a few days) by offering a voucher — we tell them "we still owe them a perfect experience"
> could you write a post on how exactly you became so knowledgeable in telling fakes from authentic items?
Sure! Copying below from another answer
Honestly I just 'hamstered' all the material I could on the most popular items.
In the beginning, in those first 10 guides I mention in the article, I just curated all the splintered bits of info* from the internet into one mega-guide, and added what I found after analysing fakes
* bits of info from as little as a forum thread comment, lost on page 48, to a full-blown attmept at a guide that, to me, wasn't exhaustive enough
In time, it refined to partly what I did in the beginning, and partly our own research which got better with exercise
Package all that info in a free, properly formatted guide (with some imperfect English, I admit, as we're not natives), and that gives us the traffic figures I screenshot'd
They started efforts to curate that, but it's far from cleaning eBay 100%
What you're saying happens, more often than we wish it'd be the case.
That's why we never considered charging for our guides, even something as little as $1 → The point was to allow people to inform themselves about fakes, with as little friction as possible
That way, if we bump the % of people who get scammed by even a few negative points, we'd still be happy for a positive contribution
It'd help us to open the watch, naturally, but we can still rely on pics. Make no mistake though — the watches can be 99.5% perfect, but (at least for the watches we're handling, which have high values) the compromise in manufacturing processes is spotted one way or another
It's worth pointing out that the discussion about replacing pieces of a fake watch with authentic pieces (making a so-called 'franken' watch, as rep watch connoisseurs call it) is a totally separate discussion
Hey thanks! I was curious to see if handling the topic of luck did vibe with people. Thanks for taking the time to mention this, as it's very valuable to me
It's true that the title was sensationalistic, and I'm the OP. I probably hang too much in the 'build in public' sphere where it's all about the numbers
I mean it'd obviously benefit me more if we kept the old title, but that'd be too much me, and too little for the community
Title got corrected and I'm actually grateful the post wasn't fully taken down (or that I wasn't banned)
EDIT: And thanks for the comment below saying u upvoted!
> It may be easy to differentiate with counterfeit shoes, but what happens with art pieces, books, collectors' items in general?
We don't do art or books, but we do some collectors' items
> What happens when a buyer disputes a counterfeit item with their "message" and the seller doesn't agree?
We ourselves can help if the customer paid via paypal/credit card — we've got the service mentioned in the article, which gets people's money back with 99.9% success rate, which we also guarantee it (so if it doesn't get your money back from the bank or from PayPal, we refund the $60 you paid us)
But yes — if you've been scammed by a malevolent seller, they might even believe the 'message' (they themselves know the item is fake anyway) and not care to do anyhting
@"I imagine most people buying Yeazys don’t have an authentic pair to compare with." — that's right! It's the position I was in, which is what I come close to mentioning in the article: it's why I made the app in the first place.
So even better than that would be a public guide where both the fake and the real are. That, plus somebody who's put in the hours to do a thorough job to explain the differences they've found.
@MTG - Somebody was just telling me the other day about these perfect (or 99% perfect) clones of Warhammer figurines. I didn't even know they can reach $1,000+ figures, but hey, with today's asset products, that doesn't surprise me.
Magic The Gathering, Pokemon games (not cards — we've covered a free guide on that), Warhammer — it seems like sky is the limit really. Whatever can be replicated and is worth $200+ will be replicated IMO
> I’m wondering how “counterfeit aware” payment processors (VISA, Mastercards, etc) are becoming?
A bit more! They trust our Certificate with less pushback these days, more than 2 years ago, when we discovered our Certificate can get people's money back. We guarantee the Certificate nonetheless, so if it doesn't get your money back from the bank or from PayPal, we refund the $60 you paid us.
I know you said payment processors, but it's the banks (exception: AMEX) that are responsible for that segment of the transaction, AFAIK — with chargebacks and what have you
But if there would be an easily integrable solution for banks/payment processors, I can see them moving vertically into that
The problem with counterfeit warhammer figures is that 99% of the players don't care much if its fake or not! Its going to be interesting how it pans out when normal 3d printing can become just as good as their sets.
My experience as a 40k player is that we are there despite GamesWorkshop and not because of them. If you want to play in-person then you will need to accommodate players that want to use customs or stand-ins (I declare this bottlecap to be a tank, sir) because the game is extremely P2W and unfriendly to experimentation otherwise.
The Pokemon community is like this as well. Everything happens on a bootleg website, partially because breeding and getting good stats is extremely time consuming, but also because the IRL scene is geared towards kids.
Not only do they not care, sources for quality counterfeits are actually a bit of a passed around community secret because gw is pretty quick to have them shut down. The counterfeits are quite a bit cheaper than gw for acceptable quality.
e.g. for this very item in the screenshot, the guide is: https://legitcheck.app/guides/real-vs-fake-hermes-birkin/
Partly answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27090248
Partly answered by someone else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089111