TOPIC: Alert! Fake Tokens...

henwy wrote: Many people have made a good living off the mantra there's one born every minute.

Wil Wheaton says not to be one.

Occam's razor. When someone claims to have purchased multiple fakes in a community overall which has only seen a handful, I know what I'm thinking.

I did see and get some of the fake treasure tokens last year. Glad that everything was resolved quite well by Jeff. I have always thought a watermark on the token would be nice, but I don't know how much that adds to token cost. Also it would not help with older TD tokens.

Got to see one of those at WYC and they were really shoddy. Only reason they would work is that no one really looks at them at the treasure generators, there's usually such a line. At least we canb revel in some schadenfreude that the person probably expected another relic haul year and got relativistically hosed

So just to be clear, you feel the person who was unlucky enough to have the fakes was the one that made them?

Even though there are multiple posts calling out the fact that they were purchased from the "reputable" sources?

I am not selling any more segments until I get Jeff to look at them. Since I had a bad seg3 but seg 1 was okay.

Marlon Hestetune wrote: So just to be clear, you feel the person who was unlucky enough to have the fakes was the one that made them?

Even though there are multiple posts calling out the fact that they were purchased from the "reputable" sources?

So far, with the exception of Lazlo, he hasn't named anyone. I see no reason why he shouldn't. I've sold rod pieces before and if I had passed on a fake I could tell you exactly where I got it from and we could all work backward to figure out the source. I have no idea why he would choose to only name the person who did the right thing and refunded and has been totally upfront about his role while keeping all the supposed other reputable sources anonymous. The entire idea of secrecy in this only makes everything more suspect. Any counterfeiter who's going for a pure profit motive will try to move as many of his items as the market can bear. The idea that we can't track down this person is ridiculous. I might not be able to say off the top of my head where a token came from but I for sure as hell have PMs, emails, paypal history, ebay history, etc and within a couple hours I could tell you exactly where it's from.

I believe he gave a time frame he was giving the various people to respond and work with him. Calling people out at this time doesn't serve anyone's purpose

Seeing as how all of the pieces that were fake were bought from someone else or received directly from TD, maybe we should give Jeff and his folks an opportunity to clear things up, rather than making veiled insinuations about the character of someone you don't know.

Yeah. How in the world does identifying the source of the counterfeits possible serve anyone's purpose. It's not like any of us would want to see such a source identified and the supply of counterfeits stopped.

If he wants to shield those who supposedly sold the counterfeits to him (and God only knows why those people, if not responsible would want would want such anonymity) then he has to deal with the consequences.

There is time to sort things out, so let's not rush to lynching.

On the other hand, once the culprit is found (and I hope there's only one) I would hope that the person be turned over to the authorities. Assuming the bad tokens were sent through US Mail, they committed a Federal crime. Mail fraud is a felony, and the amounts in question are non-trivial.

It is to the scum's benefit to come clean and try to make things right before we go nuclear, if it's not too late already. The TD community is small and we will track him or her down, and they will become someone's prison-wife. Just a matter of time.

Pffft. I seriously doubt anyone is going to serve prison time or even get a visit from the cops over this. WHat would be nice is to simply identify the person and show that this sort of thing isn't going to be tolerated. It IS a small community and that both makes this sort of thing more heinous but also easier to trace. It's one thing when someone just dumps a buncha treasure draw counterfeits into the box...we'll never find that person unless you get really lucky or they get really stupid. But someone who passes off fakes through trading? We should be able to nail that person's ass to the wall in no time flat.

If we were talking treasure chips, I'd agree. But the amount in question is thousands of dollars. Of course it will be investigated. The max penalty is 20 years, per event.