According to federal prosecutors and the defendant’s guilty plea,
Kerry Haggard, 47, Commerce, GA, used a New York-based printing
company to make high-quality copies of horror movie cards or posters
from either hard copies or digital scans of pieces he provided. It
seems that Haggard had devious plans for these high-quality copies.
Turning to the dark side, he enlisted the skullduggery of a restoration
company to attach the copies to lobby card stock and to alter the
resulting product to make it look as real as possible. Armed with these
vintage-looking rip-offs, from January 2006 to August 2009, Haggard
marketed them as vintage, collectible originals on eBay.
Why bother, you might ask. Well, some of these fakes – for classic
screamers such as the movie “Frankenstein” or “Son of Frankenstein” –
fetched from $50 to $5,000. In some cases, collectors traded their bona fide
collectibles for Haggard’s fabricated phonies. So, this con artist had
two baited hooks in the water: He would sell you a fake or trade you
for it. The bait must have looked tasty because 25 little fish
apparently bit down hard on the whole “trust me” aspect of this eBay
scam and lost at least $1.3 million in money and property.
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