Comment by sandworm101
2 months ago
FYI, these yellow dots are part of a Secret Service program to fight counterfeit currency. It was big news a couple decades ago and is well understood in art/printing circles. There are host of similar programs to protect printed money.
EURion is a funny[1] kind of DRM, what caught the fake Pokemon cards is Xerox DocuColor[0], a watermarking technology.
The difference is that DRM is designed to prevent you from copying something, while watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something. I've yet to see evidence that EURion et. all actually stop counterfeiting, but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
[1] Most DRM is intended to enforce copyright; but the state is not asserting copyright over the image of a banknote. There are cases where it is legal and moral to completely reproduce a faithful image of a banknote, and those cases are much broader than the various exceptions to copyright that exist.
> but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
Whistleblowers, too. That's believed to be how they got Reality Winner, because the documents published by The Intercept contained those tracking dots.
Eurion is part of a series of programs that stop some high-end scanner, printers and editing software from handling currency. Try scanning/editing/printing a eurion note and you will run into roadblocks. That makes it a type of DRM.
>watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something
Is that a legal requirement on paper somewhere?
It seems like an expensive feature to add if not required.
Not really, the firmware just adds the dots automatically to the rendered print. It's just datetime and the serial in most of the version of this. What's expensive about that?
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Kind of, most version it's just the serial number which is a very soft dox. Going from that to the identity of a real person is really hard if you don't have the investigative powers of the state or have hacked the printer manufacturers registration data (if the person even bothered to register their printer).
Seconded. The counterfeiters are idiots.
Maybe they are, but some of these fakes were authenticated by a third party whose entire job is to serve as a trusted authority for collectors, so they're even bigger idiots for not noticing such a well known tell. This throws everything they've ever graded into doubt.
Precisely this! This seems like a hard thing to spot from a layperson's perspective, but this is literally the purpose of their company, and these printer identification dots seem to be quite well-known in art and printing circles! This should never happen and the fact it did definitely should bring some reputational harm to CGC.
Are they? They passed off all these cards and will likely get away with it. The people left holding these cards are the ones who got 'screwed'. Though collecting, and paying high premiums, for pieces of cardboard backed by barely anything at all probably means they were screwing themselves to begin with. (IE A game of pokemon with 100% proxies is just as fun as a game of pokemon with no proxies)
I guess when I called them idiots the context in my mind was "how could they think they could get away with it using digital printing".
They've committed fraud, plain and simple. As a consequence now all things like this may get closer scrutiny and fakes like these will be binned.
For some reason I'm reminded of the fake wine guy... taking advantage of the fact that valuable wines are kept as investments, so he faked them... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
Art forgery is a crime. The original creators could, theoretically, be jailed for this.
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