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Looks like Lionel Messi has been at it again! It has been rumoured more than once that Messi gets his brother to signed items for him the lazy so and so! He gets paid very well for signing items for at least two companies, and it looks as though he has done it again with Topps! I am amazed that such a large company are seemingly unable to ensure th..

First let me say that there are some very good autograph auction houses around. They tend to specialise in this field and in most cases will guarantee that an item is what they say it is without question, but they are few and far between. The real culprits are the ones who make claims to be "fine art dealers" or similar, but in fact are really onl..

I have written a short piece warning about these sellers before, and now at last one of them has been jailed! Douglas Duren  ran a number of autograph related websites, one of which was the well known NEautographs.com in the USA. Duren was jailed for over 3 years in Birmingham, Alabama USA for mail fraud and other fraud related crimes. His websit..

The best COA for an autograph? Not an easy question to answer, as most genuine dealers will tell you that a COA is in most cases a worthless piece of paper! A COA only has a value if it has been provided by a reputable company, and one that backs that item with a full lifetime guarantee. A COA from a third party (i.e. not the person who is sell..

Should you frame your valuable autographs? Simple answer, no! Framing autographs or signed photos can be a costly business and in many cases may ruin your valuable signed item. We see a lot of framed items that have been ruined by careless framers, and framing an item will make it far more difficult to sell at a later date. We are offered items eve..

Over the past couple of years I have had some decent results in helping customers obtain refunds for fake signed items purchased both here and abroad. The USA based sales are the key ones as they will never give you a refund and put all kinds of obstacles in the way. Many of these items can be very expensive too sometimes amounting to a £1000 or mo..

Every day I am asked to check items for authenticity via my "Quick Opinion" service. The bad news is that over 50% prove to be fake in some way, but many of the buyers will simply not accept that what they have purchased is not authentic, and send me all kinds of reasons why the item must be genuine! "It has a COA with it so it must be genuine"....

I know I have covered this before but its a question that is asked so often by customers "hello, is this autograph genuine" asked when looking to buy an item from our website, and a very common question asked of any dealer. Two old sayings come to mind here the first "there is no such thing as a dumb question, only dumb people who ask questions" an..

If you have read part one you will now have a basic understanding of how an Autopen machine creates a signature, and if you have studied the John Lennon signature previously shown you should now be able to see that its not exactly as it should be, in other words it does not look as though its been done by a human hand, but neither does it look as t..

"Robographs" (a name I have coined for want of something better) are autographs created by a robot machine.  These are now becoming the scourge of the autograph world, and are becoming increasingly difficult to spot as the forgers get more proficient. These are even now fooling some good dealers and auction houses, so beware! I first spotted these ..

Another very common question, and the answer is yes we can. It's something we do every day for ourselves and of course for customers who need a value for insurance, probate or maybe they simply want to sell them on, but we do make a charge for this service as it can take some time. That said, its not as simple as it may seem....... First, to be..

I get calls on a very regular basis regarding signed posters. These are almost always multi signed posters from the latest films and signed by all the biggest stars, Star Wars and The Godfather seem to be the most common. The question I get is always the same "Are these signatures on the poster genuine, as I am now not sure!" Most of these posters ..

That is a question I get asked almost every day, but when questioned about the autographs I will be told exactly where when and how they were obtained, and offered photos of them being signed. So the question should really be "why do you want me to authenticate signatures that you yourself have obtained in person and have photographic evidence of a..

We have all heard of it, and we all use it at sometime or the other, but should we consider buying autographs via those on Facebook? Because of my previous post about obtaining a refund on eBay from a fake seller, I have had a several emails asking me about items that customers have purchased via people on Facebook. These 'sellers' appear to be sim..

A trip to Cardiff to film an edition of X-Ray for BBC wales in AFTAL dealer Robert Griffiths shop 'Carry On Collecting' with Omar Hamdi. X-Ray is a consumer based program and this edition was covering fake autographs, as the BBC had had a call from a viewer who had been sold a stack of fakes via an online auction (not the first time I have heard th..

For the third time in as many weeks, I have been asked to talk on radio about selfies and autographs! This is usually triggered by a newspaper or media article about a star who will have said they get more requests for Selfies than autographs, but find them tiresome or similar. On this occasion I was called by the Simon Mayo Radio 2 show to appea..