Judge Dredd and James Bond in Fakes Galore

Copyright can be a tricky issue, its something that has been written about on this site a number of times and we try to expose those folks who try and rip off the unsuspecting public. With that in mind I cant say I am shocked to be doing it again. Ebay is awash with bargains but lurking amongst them are a lot of fakes, and one seller in particular be highlighted today, because he just seems so brazen. The Seller is from the UK and trades under the name of justtheheroes-uk with 3000+ positive feedback this guy really highlights whats wrong with the ebay feedback system. His real name is Justin Shorthouse from Portsmouth and he has a cottage industry in making and selling fake “props”, including cards. I bought an item from him to see what he was all about.

The item was the Judge Dredd badge or as he calls it

“JUDGE DREDD PROP BADGE IN FRAME ,2000 AD”

This is a low quality RESIN CAST of the very high quality and fully licensed Termight Replicas badge. Justin glued it to a bit of wood and smeared the whole thing with gold paint. This was then stuck to a bit of cardboard with a very home printed logo under it placed in a cheap box frame and shipped.

The Resin Jimp Cast

Thats a far far cry from the 24crt gold plated double broach pinned version available from Termight and shown in the first photo. It was clear right away that this was a fake so I contacted Termight who have now confermed that Justin did indeed buy one from them back in 2006. He may well have been selling the fakes for 4 years. He gets anywhere from £10.00 to £50.00 for them depending on the the framing style and home printed materials he includes with them. The real ones? Just £19.95.
To be fair I felt it was only right to contact the seller for there side of the story so I emailed them with this message.

I received this today and it is fairly clear
that it is unlicensed and is clearly a cast of the Termight
Replicas licensed badge and looks nothing like the
ones used in the film. To be honest I am really
not very impressed with it or the home printed and
laminated inserts. It looks like the most
expensive part of this was the frame. It is not
what was advertised in the listing.

The responce was as you can imagine less than stellar, he said and I quote:

hi it is a £9.99 prop badge in frame , i do not know wat you thort it was ??, so send it back for a refund, i have a buyer for it, sorry you are not happy ,

Just wow, what can I say I may have my moments of poor spelling and grammar but this is just… wow…

Clearly we are not sending the item back when he has the full intention of trying to sell it on again. I will be sending it to Termight who would like to have a look at it and see what this gentleman has been up to.

Another Fake Mr Bond...

Of course if you look at his other items you will start to see a lot of fakes, including this next very disturbing Bond item

This is as unlicensed as it gets, a fake golden gun AND a fake Rittenhouse Archives A9 40th Anniversary Christopher Lee autograph card. The card is a fake and he clearly says so in his listing

Christopher Lee FAKE

and the gun is unlicensed because Factory Entertainment hold the rights to produce these replicas and they are only taking pre orders at the moment. The last one of these he sold went for more than £50.00.

I was interested to see what ebay would say about this so I called them to try and report these items and talk about what could be done.  You may have already guessed but ebay didn’t want to know, they told me to open a dispute with the seller on the item I had purchased but the other items were nothing really to do with me and they couldn’t discuss them.  I was told

“In the first instance you must open a dispute, and give the seller up to 10 days to respond”

Meanwhile more of the items are listed and sold and seemingly no one is bothered.  Both Termight and Factory Entertainment have been informed and are going to be taking action even if its just to lodge a complaint with VeRO. Rittenhouse Archives have yet to respond.

Be careful what you buy and who you buy it from, this stuff in particular is fairly low quality, and someone is losing money.