In most cases, the fakes are not instantly obvious, so you can't blame them for not noticing, and when you do tell them they've sold you fakes, they offer an immediate apology* and a refund; in those circumstances, if the amount of money is small I generally wear the cost. (But if you're buying a lot of Pokémon, it really starts to add up. The individual seller might only end up with tiny bit of money, but add a few dollars of postage and multiply by a half-dozen auctions with fakes in, and you're very quickly giving a lot of dough for nothing. But generally, I take the hit.
*(In most cases, that is. A (very) few however, are extraordinarily uncooperative, even straight out rude, never offer an apology for ripping you off (which is what they've done, intentionally or not)**. This one is a case in point.)
I was high bidder on a lot of Pokémon on ebay in Australia. I paid quickly, and some time later the cards arrived.
Here's the first couple of cards I saw (cards I received on the left - with images of what they should look like beside them; click on the images for larger versions).
On the first one they've misspelled the word Thunder!
On that second one, whoever made the card (not the ebay seller, of course) has been so incompetent as to use a serif font (like Times or Book Antiqua) on the card name and the attack titles, whereas all Pokémon cards are sans serif (like Arial or Helvetica) - everywhere.
Oh, and they've also spelled Pokémon wrong on the card ("Pokemon")! See:
This is very common on fakes. There's maybe a dozen other things wrong with this card (including being a holographic card that isn't holographic), but the font is an instant giveaway.
Probably the next most obvious thing to notice is that the colour is wrong (grass-type Pokemon are actually green, not some yellow-green. A lot of poor fakes tend to be too yellow (Fire Pokemon look orange instead of red, for example). But there's an issue that's very, very common with fake Pokemon that we see here. The energy symbol at the top right, and in the energy costs for the attack in the body of the card. On the Pinsir image above, compare the two energy symbols at the top:
The real energy symbol is clear, centered in its "button", and small, with a lot of clear space around it. The fake on the left is large and mis-shapen, so you can barely see the button underneath. Notice also that the fake "70 HP" is written with a light (thin) font, not nice and bold like the real card.
So after the shock of those two, I looked through the rest of the cards more carefully and (even as an almost complete novice) was immediately able to spot more than a dozen fakes (the bulk of which could be seen from the obvious Pokémon / Pokemon thing. Needless to say, I was upset - particularly given how obvious the first two are, which you don't need to know anything at all about Pokémon to spot (the first one, you just have to be able to spell "thunder" and the second, you just have to look at the cards it was sold with to notice that all the others have a markedly different title font.
Anyway, here are some more with *large* images available if you click. All of these have the obvious Pokémon-vs-Pokemon issue.
There are a number of common points to notice (besides the "Pokemon" problem)
They all have too-large energy-symbols, and in most cases they're sorta "smudgy" rather than clean.
The text is in general small/thin and hard to read, and in many cases with large inter-word gaps. (In a few cases some of the text has even ended up "on the wrong line" - though you can only tell that if you've got a real one to compare it with, and by then all the other things are generall obvious).
Both Kirlia, and to an even greater extent, Torchic, are orangey, when they should be firey-red.
As time permits, I will modify this post (or make a further post) to include further details of this trade (including images of all the other fakes), with all the various issues with these (and some of the other) fake cards from that one auction. There's lots of interesting points about the fakes here that are useful for spotting less obvious fakes - and at least 20 of the 25 are fakes, so there's plenty of material to cover here.
Here's a summary of the problems (based on what I sent to the seller after
I noticed there were fakes, but slightly modified since to include a little further
information, since I spotted an additional fake - which I mentioned to them in a later message):
There are 19 Pokemons that are plainly fake.
Just 1 Pokemon is probably real.
All but 1 of the Trainer and
Energy cards are probably real (4 of 5 cards).
This makes 20 of the 25 cards fake.
12 Cards where "Pokemon" doesn't have the accent over the e:
Pinsir (Hidden Legends 13):
Torchic (EX Power Keepers 67)
Cradily (EX Power Keepers 7)
Kirlia δ delta species (EX Dragon Frontiers 33)
Luvdisc (EX Crystal Guardians 7)
Cacturne δ delta species (EX Crystal Guardians 15)
Marowak δ delta species (EX Delta Species 10)
Sableye (EX Crystal Guardians 10)
Latios delta species (EX Holon Phantoms 22)
Typhlosion δ delta species (EX Dragon Frontiers 12)
Gardevoir (EX Power Keepers 9)
Pikachu (Basic set 58)
Card with other text errors (not already mentioned):
Charmeleon δ delta specis (Ex Crystal Guardians 30)
(misspelled attack name)
Holographic cards that aren't holographic (not already mentioned):
Blaziken ex (EX Crystal Guardians 90)
Cards with font size, weight, spacing, or other layout issues (not already mentioned):
(small card text and title with too light a font-weight/not bold enough, etc)
Spheal (EX Legend Maker 65)
Aerodactyl δ delta species (EX Holon Phantoms 35)
Zangoose (EX Holon Phantoms 34)
Bellossom δ delta species (EX Holo Phantoms 19)
Card which is not the right size or shape:
Lightning Energy (Ex Power Keepers Holo)
Non-holo, slightly too long, not even cut square (rounded end)
(see http://pokegym.net/forums/showthread.php?t=64968)
http://reviews.ebay.com/How-to-tell-FAKE-Pokemon-cards_W0QQugidZ10000000001178018
http://reviews.ebay.com/FAKE-POKEMON-CARDS_W0QQugidZ10000000005233905)
http://www.expertvillage.com/video/107870_how-spot-counterfeit-pokemon-cards.htm
**[In fact the response was worse than mere rudeness - I ended up offering to send proof (given that a description of what makes the cards fake isn't enough, apparently), and that proof took a large investment of time to obtain, since I didn't have the resources to get high quality images of the cards easily, but even once I had the images, the seller wouldn't give an appropriate email address to send that proof to, while mocking the claim that they had sent fakes. At that point, a refund became wholly inadequate. Funnily enough, all I was actually interested in was an apology and a tiny refund - just the difference in what it would have cost me in postage if they'd sent only the real cards (ie. with me still paying the full auction cost)... but I needed some hint that they were actually sorry about it first. For some reason, they chose to act like I did something wrong.
Here's a gem from their final message: "what do you want for a dollar"
In other words, the fact that nobody else bid on the auction (so it went for the minimum) apparently means I should expect to get ripped off, and not expect them to say sorry or anything? My maximum bid was above the starting bid - but if nobody else bids, that's hardly my fault. Irrespective of the price, if you advertise something as legitimate, you have a responsibility of sell something legitimate.]
