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eBay Fakes Devalue the Craft of Tomb Robbing
James McP writes "According to an article on Archaeology, fake artifacts being sold on eBay have caused the bottom to drop out of the low-end artifact market. This outcome is exactly opposite to what archeologists feared would happen when eBay came on the scene. A side effect of more and more forgers getting in on the act has been a dramatic increase in high-quality fakes that can fool experts and illicit collectors alike, lowering the price for high-end artifacts as well. It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
So wait. Are you telling me that Lara Croft's are fake?
It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal.
May not be illegal but certainly misrepresentation is a thorn in eBay's side.
The auction depicted in the article reads "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and:
Origin: North Coast Peru
Culture: Moche
Culture Date: 50 A.D. to 750 A.D. Approx.
Notice how they said "culture date" and not actual date of the mask. The phrase "Pre-Columbian" is as misleading as "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and I think I would have a problem if I purchased this as it is a pretty misleading posting.
My work here is dung.
I believe that selling a Fake as a Real Item would constitute fraud!! So still illegal!!
"eBay Fakes Devalue Lara Croft of Tomb Raiding"
Tomb Raiding is so 1996
Now its all about simple JavaScript-based Web 2.0 games that even the people buried in the tombs can enjoy
Wow, who could have ever thought new technology could have beneficial side effects? That's just crazy.
I'm glad to see this get press. Maybe some people will think twice about jumping on the alarmist "Must Fear Everything New" bandwagon.
Then again, it double's their potential for attention-whoredom: make news talking up your baseless dire predictions, then make news with the shocking revelation that, not only did your predicts not come true, the opposite happened! Who could have seen this amazing twist ending!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Yes! now everyone can own the "original" andean artifact handcrafted in the time of Cortez, but please only limited qualities available. Until we "uncover" more with our skillful team of archaeologists.
Am I the only one that finds it a little odd that people are interested in purchasing items raided from tombs in the first place? O.o
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
"It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes"
So Laura Croft has moved from Mass Murderer to Forgery?
Harumph! Ebay? They belong in a museum!
It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes
Wonderful! It is exactly this kind of advice that will get us through the credit crunch.
Stay tuned tomorrow, when we will explain to you how to save on bullets but just pretending not to hear or see your enemies and/or cheating spouses!
I sell fake artifacts for the fake ebay artifact auctions, and have noticed this. I used to get three times as much for my fake artifacts (with aged certificate of authenticy). Because of this, I now write "This Artifact is Fake, Hoser" in the appropriate runes on each one I produce. They still sell well, and noone has caught on yet.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I wondered that original Holy Grail I bought of eBay was so gosh-darned cheap.
I know, because he often rises from the dead in the middle of the night while I'm sleeping. He then proceeds to drink my beer, eat my chips and generally make a mess of the apartment.
He seems to have a penchant for microwave burritos as well. I can't remember any references to burritos in the Bible's chapter of "Exodus."
And he has been downloading porn on my computer, as well. Mummies seem to be into some weird kink. I'm kind of glad that I can't read Hieroglyphics . . . that's probably some nasty stuff that scholars have mistranslated.
If he was not such a valuable archeological artifact, I probably would have tossed the bastard.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So, the way to wipe out the illegal stealing and smuggling of ancient relics is to flood the market with cheap fakes. What other areas of unlawful exploitation can this principle be applied to? Drugs? Child porn? Bootleg music and movies? I believe flooding the prostitution market with fake girls has already been tried, but it hasn't been too successful at curbing demand.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This headline totally should have been:
eBay Fakes Lower Craft of Tomb Raiding.
My coworker is an amateur paleontologist. He has a reasonably serious collection that takes up most of his house, and does a lot of trading as well as collecting. He has a lot of stories about fakes.
"Dominican Amber" is this beautiful, amazingly clear, amazingly inexpensive amber from the Dominican Republic. Except that when you do some research, it all comes through one company, who has filed patents on taking ground-up amber fragments and re-melting them under pressure into new-old amber.
Likewise, there are some amazing specimens of fossil fish coming out of China, where their skins are fantastically preserved so you can easily see individual scales. Only, a lot of them are completely identical. They're not cast replicas, though: they took an original, cast or machined a negative in metal, then put pieces of slate on top of the negative and vibrated it until it has excavated a perfect copy into the slate -- so it's pure, natural, ancient rock with something that looks exactly like a fossil. In fact, it's pretty hard to tell the difference even for people who know fossils, unless they have a microscope and some time to inspect the edges where the fossil meets the rock.
He said there are also loads of intricate fossils, stuff with lots of fine features (like the tentacles on squids) that have actually been broken off, and a talented fossil restorer has just cut a new one in the rock itself to make the fossil look complete.
All of these, like the fake antiques, have made the real ones less expensive -- but at the same time, they make a market larger, because more people can afford to buy, and at some point that could make the demand rise sharply overall, even though the individual pieces cost less, still contributing to increased demand for originals.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
This scam has been going on for thousands of years -- many religious relics are fake, most notably the heads of John the Baptist (Catholic News Agency; also referred to by Umberto Eco in his mediaeval novels).
More controversially, the Our Lady of Guadalupe icon in Mexico also has a very uncertain provenance.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
"selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
If you pretend it's real, it's fraud.
Genuine Egyptian Mummy case!
Real Mummy's curse included!
Totally legal, and licensed by the Royal authority of Egytpian Antiquities!
If all the stuff in your house doesn't disappear after the curse, your money back guaranteed!
Case in point: my father collects roman coins and is quite expert. Recently he bought a coin on eBay that appeared perfectly real. But then some time later the same coin was for sale again. He contacted the other buyer and they traded high-res pics: they were identical down to the same defects. He then started a private inquiry on the buyers which led him to some russian (what a surprise) groups that sell perfect fakes on the Internet to people who want to then sell them on eBay. They do mass quantities (in the thousands). They even guarantee them against several types of scientific tests (including fluorescence and mass spectrography) ! I have no idea how they can do that, unless they have access to a certain amount of 2000 year old copper and other metals.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Why think so small?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They are very careful to avoid actually saying that the items are artifacts.
Anyway, what are you going to do, tell the police you bought an item you thought was illegal and it turned out it wasn't? Go ahead, cops deserve a laugh now and then. I am sure they will drop all the murder and rape cases and jump right on top of it. Just like cops jump on copy right infringement (note that the police doesn't, only prosecutors looking for a lucrative job after their public service).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It should go without saying that buying anything at auction, meatspace or digital, is a risky venture if you don't know what you're buying.
A fool and their money are soon parted, eBay just makes the process easier for the scammer.
So now we know how God made all those fossils to test the faith of his followers against belief in "evolution".
Think of all the hard working honest tomb raiders hacking their way through a jungle somewhere so that you can have your trinket from some dead culture collecting dust on your mantle.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
there is nothing you can possess that I cannot duplicate.
there is nothing that you possess that I cannot duplicate and sell on Ebay!
Part of making a system which allows for making purchases globally extremely easy is screwing with the local economy of any area which largely has access to that system. Just imagine what will happen in the streets if marijuana was legalized and people started selling it online.
What we are seeing here is the archeological equivalent of cracking DRM.
Once pieces can be reproduced indistinguishably from the real thing at cost X, the value of the real thing trends towards X.
Archeology's DRM has been cracked.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The same has occured with the trade of endangered plant species to an extent.
The illegal trade of endangered flora has let to the destruction or near destruction of many species. Ebay sales have allowed people to trade plants that were grown in private collections rather than habitat and due to the risk of illegal habitat smuggling of plants, people growing them in cultivation can undercut those selling plants taken illegally from habitat.
This has allowed some highly endangered species to recover as the pressure from illegal smuggling has died away due to it not being worth the time for smugglers when mass growing at plant nurseries means they can be undercut to the point it's not even worth the smugglers driving to the habitat, let alone risking doing the smuggling itself.
Ironically though, the international process designed to help protect endangered species - CITES - actually hampers this because it prevents international trade of endangered plants even if they were grown purely in private collections and never grown in habitat, whilst smugglers ignore such regulations anyway.
As with this and as with artifacts there's a lot to be said about free trade of fakes, or in this case - privately and responsibly grown plants rather than restriction of it. It allows market forces to undercut costs of authentic specimens to the point where it's simply not worth smuggling from a monetary point of view. If more was done to support the trade of "fakes" rather than hamper it as per CITES I think decline of smuggling would actually help - it's better to prevent smuggling at the source and protect habitat than it is to try and catch it at the ports because again, smugglers will avoid the ports anyway.
selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal.
Right, except for that whole fraud thing.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
of some musical compilations sold on TV during the '80s. Things like "25 Best Soft Rock Tunes From 1984, by the Original Artists".
Later it came to light that this small recording company had put together a studio band named "The Original Artists", and was doing covers of the original works.
If I recall correctly, there was a class-action suit, and the recording company lost.
They SHOULD be easy to reproduce. Almost all of truely antique pots and so on were made hundreds of years ago be just "normal indians" It is not like most of them were in their time "high art" it was jsut the vilage potter's work and likely sold for a small amount. The potter made these from local cheap materials that are still locally available and cheap,. Basically any skilled potter who knows what to do can turn out many pots per day both now and 500 years ago.
This is not the same thing as a fake Rembrandt oil painting. 1,000 years ago these pots were made by people of avgerage skills.
So are the "artifacts" in Avalon 4 real or fake? I just read Charles Stross's "Halting State" and almost questioned my sanity when I first saw this thread's title!
One of the best ideas I ever heard was that someone should generate fake tiger bones, rhinoceros horns and other artifacts of endangered species and flood the markets with them. This would cause the prices to collapse, making it no longer economical to be a poacher.