Comment by TacticalCoder

When it comes to highly valuable collectibles, the chinese are very good at making fakes. Take a pricey watch, like the Rolex Daytona 116500LN (unobtaimium at a dealership, MSRP $13 K or so but impossible to get, so they went up to $40 K used [but never used])... Well you've got chinese counterfeit, like Noob factory and others, where they even number the revisions and each revision is better than the last one.

Journalists asks a counterfeiter "but how comes you improved so much between v5 and v6 and it's now impossible to tell the watch appart without opening it?" and the counterfeiter answers: "We watch your YouTube videos where you compared our v5 to a real one and see everything we missed that you noticed and we fix these".

Fakes are so good now a percentage of the parts can be swapped for real ones (meaning there's also now an issue of "frankenwatch": bad guy takes one real one and two fake ones and creates two "frankenwatch", which both have parts of the original, making them even harder to tell from real ones seen that they're each partially the real thing).

I've got all my Magic the Gathering cards from the nineties. Some are worth 4 digits a pop. I know there are insanely good chinese fakes now. There's one way to tell certain fakes with a magnifier but don't be fooled: chinese counterfeiters are watching all the YouTube vids about how to tell fakes from real cards and are enhancing their process. And if it requires "magic" fingerprint, they'll modify their printing process to be able to reproduce even those hidden dots.

Wizards of the Wokes (sorry, Wizards of the Coast) tried to fix the issue by adding holograms and foils and whatnots but even that the chinese can of course copy and, anyway, it's mostly the old, simplest to copy, cards that are worth $$$$ (except for some unique cards like the "One ring" from the "fat goldberry", "asian gandalf" and "black aragorn" edition of Lord of The Rings. Yup, Wizards of the Wokes went full DEI, so full left that their brains fell out of their skulls and they really did black aragorn, asian gandalf and fat golderry -- certainly as an homage to Tolkien's legacy and certainly to please Tolkien's fans). So Wizards of the Wokes: from the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourself!)