I honestly wish you the best of luck telling the fakes from the real ones. I must not have the eye for it. I have looked at both many times and not seen the difference. I know I could not tell the difference between the two quickly when trading with a cast member. Pesonally if I spent that much money on pins and it was important to me to make sure they were real I would not be trading them at Disney. I know they have events for trading maybe that is more the place.
I am not ones that buys into "only people with $$$" should be allowed to do an activity. Many people save for for a long time to go to WDW and there children are just as entiled to experience trading. Trading pins is about the FUN of it. It should not be an activity only for people that have the $$$.
Everyone is entiled to there own opinion and I respect that everyone has different views. I am not discounting your view. I just have a very different view. As long as WDW continues to charge crazy prices for a single pin that my child is going to trade away I am going to continue to buy them on ebay for cheap.
Happy trading everyone - it is all about the excitment of it in the end.
No need to wish me luck, I have been able to spot fakes many many times. I'm sorry you feel the way you do, I don't support criminals or criminal activity so I don't *intentionally* buy scrappers from eBay, have I? YES absolutely, as recently as just a month or so ago, did I take them to the park and trade them? NO I did not, the ones I could tell were fake I kept at home, I use them as push pins on cork boards, I cut the post off the back and make them into magnets for the fridge, the ones that were really bad I cut the post off and then threw them in the trash. I have to say some of those fakes were soooooooooooooooooooo bad that I honestly can't see how anyone would think they were real.
Trading pins used to be much easier, you never had to worry about scrappers, you just had to have pins to trade. Disney never intended pin trading to just be fun, it was intended to be a hobby and something that was going to be on the pricier end of things, it wasn't supposed to be "affordable". Fun and expensive, that's why I always say if you can't afford to buy the pins from Disney don't trade.
Disney doesn't charge crazy prices for pins that your kid will just trade away, you can buy booster packs in the parks and pay about $4 per pin, that's not crazy and I'd be more than happy that price if there weren't so many scrappers out there. With the scrapper epidemic I cap my trading pin price at $3 a pin because I'm tired of paying more of getting a scrapper in return.
Yes, people can have differing opinions and I respect your opinion. I'm also not trying to win a debate on this subject, but it is important enough to me that I will continue to discuss it when people ask about getting pins on eBay. It is important enough that I will continue to refer people to the eBay thread on the Collector's Board and I will continue to post my finding on that thread as well.
I don't trade in WDW, we only go to DLR, there are some educated CM's there that will take a pin and give the trader the pin they ask for and then the CM will pocket the pin they were given, they do this because they suspect it is a fake and until they can verify if it is or not they don't want to trade it.
my disclaimer is that I'm not a pin expert by any means but I've learned a lot about scrappers over the past 6 years of trading at DL/DCA and I try to share my knowledge with others when I feel it is necessary. Again, I'm not a purist or a fanatic, rather a trader who tires of the hobby being tarnished by cheap fake pins being sold by unscrupulous sellers.
