Urban Art Association

Curious if the letter will be printed with a watermark, chop, hologram or anything to prevent copying. I suppose the hand signed makes it more difficult to copy but forgers gonna forge. Not that it matters to me much, just curious.

I think they said they had 50.

I'm sure this is old news for many of you. Just giving a heads up that one of the more notorious sellers of fakes on eBay is still going at it, complete with her old bag of tricks.

I noticed a lot of pics in these threads were hosted on sites like Photobucket. Use imgur.com instead, you can keep the full resolution images hotlinked to threads like these. The inability to load a lot of the photobucket images made going through the threads a bit of a hassle to find what I needed.

(Edit: This confirmed real tenner image is from the threads posted on this board. I also changed the text color of quoted sections for readability.)

A lot of threads on here with people not really able to tell if theirs are fake when it's rather obvious to spot the issues.

• No complete circles/rosettes of the offset print when you desaturate the image
• Fake's print tends to result in a scale/teardrop shape loaded with JPEG artifacts.
• You will see straight lines tearing through all over the print that are visible to the naked eye.
• It's chunky/blocky looking,
• the bordering/proportions are wrong,
• The print doesn't line up to the cut or to each other on both sides. You will see an overlap edge of the seam between the edges a mm or two in on the back side.

It's a pretty shoddy repro. Someone who took enough time and care to stack and align papers in their inkjet before flipping the page over to print on the other side could do a better job.

The real tenners are printed on currency like paper.

NOT laser printed card stock. If your bill is stiff and even slightly smooth and/or glossy, it's fake.



That one is real. You can see the texture. Scans of the real might pick up the texture and distort the image as a result.

The one below is not real. Note how the bill reflects light along with the surface of the table.

You should not see any glare.



The seller in question is still using the same eBay names.

• champs111088
  
• littlelegs269
• 8450martino

Champs and Martino have active listings as of this post, which is why I have created a thread.

A previous thread mentions she lives in Melksham, Wiltshire... Which matches with the return address on file that I got from eBay.

She often lists the tenners in the 80-100 quid range. All of her listings use terms like "Original" and "Authentic" in the byline description. Not sure why she doesn't have more negative feedback. Sometimes you'll find some with no bids for 10-15.

She often lists her items as selling from Bristol, United Kingdom or Devizes, United Kingdom.

but the envelope I got from her has a curious little sticker stating:



So I wonder if she's using multiple addresses to scam people out of refunds by saying she never got the package.

And yes, she's still doing the same bullshit letter.



And that completes the scam.

You call her out, she stonewalls, says her items are legit, doesn't tell you how, gives you excuses and tells you to go look at blogs and youtube.

"The best advise I can offer is to take a look at YouTube this way not only do you get the view of many different bloggers but they are totally unbiased."

When you ask her to demonstrate that it's not fake... She'll quip with remarks like:

"I have given you more than enough to follow, if that's not enough what else to you want."

She offers a "full refund"... 

"Hey buddy if you don't like, that's ok, send it back for a full refund, I will even pay for the return postage, but don't start using threats, I loath that kind of approach."

The threat? Contacting eBay because she is selling fake items.

But therein lies the rub.

In her letter: "On a somber note, my Banksy's have been delicately marked, only known to me, this is because of buyers sending back photo copies."

Multiple eBay usernames, multiple names used across multiple eBay accounts, multiple mailing addresses, refusal to demonstrate her item is real, hidden in the letter is a threat that she will tell eBay what you sent back is a photocopy.

Chantelle's not a very nice girl. (She has also gone as Michelle and Christopher) Just because of her snide attitude, I press on.

So she offers to pay for return postage... but as soon as she accepted my refund request...



And that's when she kicks it up a notch with the game playing.



I work with a shipping broker. It's trivially easy to pull up quotes. I guess she thought she was going to bully me into laziness.















And just like that, she gave me the case.

It was entertaining. Probably worth the 15 quid I burned. Not quite sure why someone who works for the NHS thinks it's okay to engage in international mail fraud, however. 

....So did anyone find out how many Bottleneck actually sold?

Bottleneck replied to an Instagram comment of a picture they took of one and said “should be about 50”.

I agree that it doesn't really matter but based on the info from this thread, I agree with the above estimate of approximately (50 regular sale) + (40 mentioned second release) + (some number presale). I don't recall seeing BNG mention a presale number but Pawel above mentioned at least 40 which sounds right - I can't imagine it'd be too many more than regular sale, maybe 50 pre and 50 regular? All in all I'd guess 150-200 based on what we've seen - 400-500 seems high but who knows.