from Hacker News

Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024

by grep_it on 1/30/25, 6:38 PM with 475 comments

  • by Validark on 1/31/25, 5:30 AM

    Does it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? That you have to pay for it to be forensically watermarked against your own interests? And why have all these companies just taken orders from 3 letter agencies about this? Doesn't anyone have integrity? Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?

    I guess the whole smartphone thing answers that question far better than a printer...

  • by sbarre on 1/30/25, 7:04 PM

    I find it interesting that this research seems to be (at a glance from reading that first page of the thread) coming from someone who owns some of these fraudulent cards (and could have just re-sold them and kept their mouth shut).

  • by MrJagil on 1/30/25, 7:38 PM

    If you're interested in this kind of thing, Tavis King is one of the more knowledgable people with regards to mtg. Here's him mapping a booster to print sheet, to see how many Lotus' are still out there, possible to be opened: https://youtu.be/nnYe8FWTu_o?feature=shared&t=184

    edit: If you want the very technical version, here's a video from his own channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnYLvWdNd8

  • by aidenn0 on 1/30/25, 7:43 PM

    I remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black text. It looked great to the naked-eye, but trivial to see the difference due to differing print technology under a microscope. I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.

    [edit]

    Just re-read the post and realized these were identified as fake just from the picture posted online. That makes a lot more sense.

  • by tivert on 1/30/25, 9:43 PM

    So, knowing nothing about Pokemon, it was lost on me if 2024 was legitimate or not (I suspected not, but it seems the article kind of assumes you know when the cards should have been made).

    This article seems to give a clearer picture:

    https://www.pokebeach.com/2025/01/millions-of-dollars-of-pro...

    > Millions of Dollars of Prototype Pokemon Cards May Be Forgeries, Retired Creatures Employee Involved

    > The authenticity of the Pokemon TCG’s famous “prototype cards” are now being called into question.

    > Last year, hundreds of prototype Pokemon cards began to sell in collecting circles from the personal collection of Takumi Akabane, one of the original creators of the Pokemon TCG. He worked at Creatures until 2008. He recently attended events to sign some of the cards. Grading company CGC worked closely with Akabane to verify the cards’ authenticity.

    > The prototype cards represent the earliest days of the TCG, produced in 1996 before Base Set released in Japan. They show the progression of Pokemon cards from their “proof of concept” stage where they used their Red & Green sprites to their beta designs that used their final artwork from Mitsuhiro Arita and Ken Sugimori.

  • by HanayamaTriplet on 1/30/25, 9:18 PM

    The fact that a large grading company would not check such a basic type of forgery makes it seem like they're in on the scam. This sounds similar to what happened with video game grading company Wata, who were alleged to have fraudulently inflated the value of games they were grading:

    https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/grading-firm-wata-i...

  • by sandworm101 on 1/30/25, 7:12 PM

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

  • by wxw on 1/30/25, 7:24 PM

    TIL printer dots! Also curious if someone more familiar with this space/community could provide more backstory here. Reading some of the comments in the forum, it seems like 1) these "beta cards" surfaced a while ago and have been a contentious topic since, 2) a card authenticator business is involved. What's the scale of this scheme? What's the impact going forward/how much money is tied into this?

  • by kristianp on 1/30/25, 8:52 PM

    What personal info is printed in these yellow dots? Are they present if I print from Linux? Brother colour laser owner here.

    Edit, from [1] posted in this thread it looks like date printed and printer serial number are printed. And if it's done by the printer firmware it wouldnt help to use OS drivers.

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Compar...

  • by __loam on 1/30/25, 6:58 PM

    This is something that's pretty well known in the magic the gathering community. Some of us who trade in older cards to play certain formats have jeweler's loupes to check this stuff.

  • by Suppafly on 1/30/25, 7:09 PM

    It's cool that printers have this technology, but the flip side is that it actually makes the printers worse at being printers for doing prints.

  • by throw_m239339 on 1/30/25, 7:05 PM

    Reminds of the fake "sealed" authentic NES cartridges going for thousands of dollars or more on Ebay. It is a very lucrative business for scammers.

  • by alliao on 1/30/25, 9:05 PM

    I don't get why yellow isn't subsidised for all the printers I'm running out of yellow despite hardly ever printing any colour or is this printer manufacturer's subtle protest

  • by aaroninsf on 1/30/25, 7:19 PM

    The way humans construct "authenticity" and negotiate the ship of Theseus is going to provide so much fodder for the AIs to entertain themselves.

    Like my father-in-law interrogating me about being vegetarian at the dinner table, the sardonic Socratic dialog really writes itself...

    "OK; but now what if I were to selectively replace the molecules of one and only one pigment with a visually identical analog that is slightly modified to be more stable over time and with respect to UV exposure—could THAT still be an original card?"

  • by eqvinox on 1/30/25, 8:38 PM

    It would be incredibly funny if these cards are actually genuine and someone just didn't bother to set the clock (year) correctly on their printer.

    (But I don't believe this is the case and am not sure if available printers back in 1996 would even emit these patterns in this form. Just noting in this case the device's knowledge of date and time is also a factor of uncertainty.)

  • by tzs on 1/30/25, 10:15 PM

    OT: I've wondered about printed forgeries, but in the context of comic books rather than cards.

    Suppose someone in the 1960's had bought a printing press of the same make/model as what was being used to print Marvel comics. Suppose they also bought a large supply of the same ink and the same paper and the same staples. They then wait.

    Then decades later they can see which 1960's Marvel comics have become valuable collectables. The early '60s was when Marvel introduced Spider-Man, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Black Widow, and the X-Men for example, many of which went on to fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions for mint condition copies.

    They they use their vintage press, ink, paper, and staples to print mint condition forgeries.

    What would their chances of fooling people be?

  • by hombre_fatal on 1/30/25, 9:44 PM

    The article doesn't explain what playtest cards are nor what is being caught by their detective work.

    It doesn't even mention the word counterfeit.

    I can guess what's happening here, but I'd like to know more concrete info about the scale and impact of this, how much people were paying for these cards, etc.

  • by nyczomg on 1/30/25, 7:41 PM

    Printer dots also led to the arrest of Reality Winner who leaked an internal NSA document to The Intercept which published it unredacted.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

  • by talldayo on 1/30/25, 7:00 PM

    Looks like we hugged them too hard: https://archive.ph/hKXoK

  • by mmmlinux on 1/30/25, 7:18 PM

    In case anyone ever wonders why their printer wont print a black and white document when its out of yellow? This.

  • by chungy on 1/30/25, 6:58 PM

    Punch card technology!

    At least that's what I thought of, with those dot patterns forming bits.

  • by salgernon on 1/30/25, 7:04 PM

    I always thought that a near learning project would be training an ML on “real” cards and then detecting fakes. I don’t play the games but I was always thrown by how much effort went into counterfeits, but I guess there’s enough profit for someone. There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors.

  • by Rendello on 1/30/25, 10:10 PM

    This was in the hacker Zeitgeist a few years ago, when "Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker", though it's unclear whether the dots were used or if it was one of the other opsec failures.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494818

  • by insane_dreamer on 1/31/25, 1:51 AM

    > The combined sales across all auction websites likely exceeds $10M. Individual cards were selling between four to six figures, based on the variant and the popularity of the Pokemon.

    Woah, I had no idea Pokemon cards could be so valuable (obviously I don't know much about Pokemon other than my kids use to play with them)

  • by lightedman on 1/31/25, 4:57 AM

    Protip: That yellow dye is almost always fluorescent. 365-405nm light will make it light right up.

  • by Ekaros on 1/30/25, 7:33 PM

    It makes one really wonder why this is not absolute basic step in the "authentication" process. You could pretty much automate this as part of documentation process.

  • by hnburnsy on 1/30/25, 11:10 PM

    I know nothing here but just assumed the card stock for all these collectible cards was unique, easily identified, and hard to counterfeit. I guess not.

  • by anonu on 1/31/25, 2:45 PM

    Can NFTs solve this problem?

  • by jbv9901 on 1/31/25, 3:27 PM

    always nice to see a Discourse Forum in the wild!

  • by kaichanvong on 1/31/25, 3:25 PM

    with-lots this information (in the game Pokémon/Pokemon TCG*), there so many-chances for misinformation of exact-words; however, its possible to realise from Titles, much more details in-print, art-work, these almost "easter eggs" actually printed-out

    meta-data/"metadata", is 1 point to consider when seems "noisy", hopefully browsers take-care for having seen–noticed

    However, its lucky to see these almost "behind-the-scenes" look at what is happening there. Hopefully people that contribute, realise these details, more, are what is happening! (even in January, 2025)

    (thank-you for sharing)

    *TCG (Tradable Card Game)

  • by Scoundreller on 1/31/25, 8:17 AM

    > Different brands use different dot encoding patterns, and not all of these can be decoded. The companies don’t reveal this information so any known pattern has been cracked by someone from the general public.

    Ehhhhhhhhh, not always

  • by m348e912 on 1/30/25, 9:45 PM

    My theory:

    If you ever wondered why color printers with a separate black ink tank won't print a black and white document when it's low on color -- it's because they have to print the secret yellow dots for fingerprinting purposes and need the color ink to do so.

  • by marcodiego on 1/30/25, 7:25 PM

    I want to buy a printer but I want it to simply print what I tell it to (which indeed is exactly how it should behave). What can I do?

  • by hatingisok on 1/30/25, 7:19 PM

    No wonder the yellow in my printer is always empty!

  • by TacticalCoder on 1/30/25, 11:01 PM

    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!)

  • by ziofill on 1/31/25, 1:40 AM

    If they went through the trouble of printing fraudulent cards, why would they print the actual date?