How to Spot a Fake Pokémon Card

• Genuine Pokémon cards use CMYK offset printing (four-color overlay); under magnification you can see a regular dot-pattern structure
• Under magnification, counterfeit cards show a noticeable drop in print quality (per CGC's tested examples)
• A common counterfeiting method: gluing a printed fake card face onto an ordinary modern card, resulting in a thickness close to double that of a genuine card
• Looking at a card's cross-section reveals a genuine card's layered structure: blue card back, white paper, black core, another white layer, and finally the colored card face
• In one batch of counterfeits examined by CGC, the card backs were actually genuine — the counterfeiters had glued a fake face onto a real card

The official Pokémon Support article "Did I purchase fake or counterfeit cards?" also discusses packaging identification, among other angles, but this tool's WebFetch request to that page returned a 403 and could not directly retrieve the text to verify exact wording, so it was not used; only the CGC case-study article content that could be verbatim-verified is used as formal evidence here. This entry does not involve any price/retail-value criteria, and strictly retains only identification points related to printing, material, and card-back construction.

• Bottom-left or bottom-right corner: the set symbol and the collector number (e.g. 4/102) tell you the set; older cards have no symbol at all, which itself narrows them to Base Set.
• Left of the number: a 1st Edition stamp, if present, sits below the art on WOTC-era cards.
• Regulation mark (a letter in a box near the bottom, D through H so far) dates modern cards to a two-year window.
• Back of the card: the blue Poké Ball back has changed little since 1999; a washed-out, blurry or wrongly colored back is the first sign of a fake.

Lay the card flat on a dark surface in daylight, straight on, with the whole card in frame, then a close-up of the bottom edge where the set symbol, number and any edition stamp sit. Tilt holo cards under the light for a second shot to show the foil pattern. Photograph the back too. The app reads the card and set; the edition and rarity checks above tell you which version you have.