Primarily Petroliana Shop Talk Forums Shop Talk Petroliana Forums General Petroliana Discussion India fakes and the future

So I was recently searching for flange signs on EBay and was surprised at that about 80% of the signs I observed were porcelain fakes coming from India. It got me thinking about how awful that is. It isn’t going to take long for those to end up collections for sale, garage sales and auctions. Just think about how that will look in 20 years when the reproduced sign is actually 20 years old and alot of the experts are gone. It will be hard to tell where Grandpa got the sign from when the adult kids have to sell it off.

They seem to be getting better at reproducing them too. I don’t have a point to this ramble. It just sucks. It would be one thing if they were labeled as “reproduction” somewhere small in the corner or something. It is the misleading side to it that makes it tough.

they've got ebay flooded with there junk, as mentioned above there craftsmanship has improved as some of the signs are dead on-
it makes you a little gun shy as not too make a mistake & do your homework - if not sure, DON'T .. ...

This is why I do not collect porcelain anymore. Future is clouded unless you are really good at knowing, I am not. This in the future will possibly stem the tide of collecting some items.

Obviously this topic comes up pretty frequently here on the site.....bottom line is when a particular hobby area catches on and big money starts trading hands, the fakers and frauds are waiting in the wings to try and get their piece of the pie, usually at the expense of newcomers. Like many on this site I was happy I collected before the India reproductions flooded our hobby. There are so many reproduction/fantasy Mobil pump plates on the market now it's just sickening to me, more so sickening that it doesn't seem to matter to buyers that they are fake, they're happily paying hundreds of dollars for fantasy items that were never even produced in the past.

No one knows what will happen in the future, but my guess will be that the authentication services will become more and more utilized by collectors and those running trusted auction services. There will always be the decorators that won't care if something is original or not, but those of us spending our hard earned money want to be certain we are getting a genuine piece if that's what we're after.
Darin