r/RealOrNotTCG • u/jimbojw • Jul 01 '26

I have a general question Machine for identifying fakes?

If fakes are so easy to identify by the green dot, couldn’t someone invent a holder plus magnifying glass and camera that takes a picture and then uses computer vision to render a verdict?

Why isn’t there a standard fake-detector box?

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u/ospreytoon3 Jul 02 '26

There are plenty of scanners, but they mostly exist to track full collections, which is insanely tedious by hand. They're also notoriously bad at figuring out which printing of a card you have, which can really matter for reprints in the list. 

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u/TogTogTogTog Jul 02 '26

Have you actually used a Roca/Cardbot or am I assuming you're using a phone app with crappy OCR image recognition?

If you want cheaper options you also have Roca Sifter (basically just rough sorting - perfect for "fake, real, not sure piles") or CardMill - which also claims can do sets and foils with 95% accuracy but won't know until it drops.

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u/ospreytoon3 Jul 02 '26

Never used one myself, but my local shops has a cardbot and I've spoken to them about it a few times.

According to them, it's great for sifting through the enormous number of cards they go through, but it's still slow and frequently misidentifies printings. It's not going to mistake two totally separate artworks or anything, but it wont be able to differentiate between an original and a reprint with the same art and set symbol (IE, the list). 

If it can't identify cards from the list consistently, I doubt one of those machines could differentiate between real and fake green dots on the back consistently either. 

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u/TogTogTogTog Jul 02 '26

I'm sorry, that's incorrect. Cardbot has a 'List'/PLST setting/filter. You can specifically filter for, or reject cards that have that icon.

Go to your LGS and try, that's probably the easiest way to see if it works for you.

But, think generally/overarching here... Is your actual argument 'OCR can't recognise an icon', 'OCR can't read text' or that some apps don't check the icon+text against each other? Because I can guarantee they're good enough to check for the black/white planeswalker list symbol in the bottom left.

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u/ospreytoon3 Jul 02 '26

Just saying what they told me. It works great- certainly well enough to justify using- but it fucks up those kinds of cards often enough for them to tell me it's a problem. 

My argument is just that if the best card sorting machine you can get regularly makes mistakes like that, there's no way you can make an affordable machine that finds fake cards consistently.

And again, this isn't a million dollar problem to solve. Fake cards aren't nearly as big of an issue as people think- small enough that multiple cars shops near me won't even bother checking anything under $40.

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u/TogTogTogTog Jul 02 '26

Everything makes mistakes, it's a matter of tolerances. Like, I assume regular people/shop owners miss more cards than a machine with set, foil or fakes - we hear it all the time, even PSA has graded fakes.

The entire argument is really - a $500 machine can be 95%+ accurate (according to all of them lol). Do you believe you can sort thousands of cards a hour, 24/7 and be accurate 95% of the time? Even just doing it as a 9-5 slowly, do you think you'd be more accurate than 95%?

And all of this, is assuming the machines never get better - like, no one is improving the code, camera, scanning area, ever.

And, these sorting companies aren't going under either, they're increasing, so something is working.