Yet another reason to look at ebay books with extreme skepticism...

A Reading, PA man has been indicted on Federal charges of forgery/fraud charges. According to the charges, he has made over $300,000 over the last several years foisting "signed" books to buyers on Ebay. The only upside here is that he apparently would buy a genuine inscribed copy and then have a company MAKE A RUBBER STAMP of the signature and use that to "inscribe" copies that he would then foist on buyers on ebay...the silver lining being that his bogus crap books should be easier to spot than "better" forgeries.

That is the real problem with this thief (can you really be a forger if all you do is rubber-stamp books?) and others like him. I do not have much...or any...sympathy for those who buy forgeries from sellers on ebay. Unless you know the seller to be reputable (this does *not* count ebays own "I am not a crook" system) personally and/or professionally, I think you have to *presume* that what you see listed on ebay is fraudulent. If, as here, you pay real money for a book from "bev103162smith," you deserve whatever arrives at your door.

The *problem* is that now and into the untold future, these bits of garbage are going to be polluting the secondary market. Even if you would never think about buying an inscribed work from ebay, you are going to have them offered to you in years to come by "innocent" buyers and/or their families. Rubber-stamp copies, one hopes, should be reasonably easy to spot...but I wager there are better (and worse) examples out there... I'd go so far as to suggest that unless you know the provenance of a given inscribed copy, it is not unreasonable to presume it is forged. 

Worse still, the growth of this kind of fraud poisons the well...driving potential collectors out of the field either because they have been burned or because they read articles like the above and decide it is just not worth the risk/headache. I know at least three of my clients started working with me only after they had been buying on their own on ebay and been burned more than once...I wonder how many knew they'd been burned, but lost the desire to pursue books altogether. As it stands now, I actively try to guide my clients away from inscribed modern lit and into "safer" (and more client-specific) areas. 

Ebay, of course, "has no comment"...as they steadfastly hold that they simply provide an infrastructure for the transactions and have no responsibility to police their cesspool for stolen property, fraud or forgeries. To paraphrase the good Dr., if you want to avoid forgeries, retain a book(wo)man you trust.