Upper Deck's Fraud Investigation Team, which was just announced on December 9, made its first major bust on December 12 at GenCon SoCal.   Working in cooperation with the Anaheim Police Department, the F.I.T. team seized nine large boxes of Chinese Yu-Gi-Oh cards from the Go2iguanas.com booth.  The seized cards had an estimated value of $5000.  The bust was made with the cooperation of GenCon officials.  Go2iguanas.com has been added as a defendant in Upper Deck's lawsuit against individuals and companies marketing and selling counterfeit Yu-Gi-Oh cards (see 'Upper Deck Sues 50 Over Counterfeit Yu-Gi-Oh Cards').

Here are some guidelines for retailers and consumers, who may be offered the opportunity to buy Yu-Gi-Oh cards, sometimes at very low prices: 

1. No authorized Yu-Gi-Oh cards are manufactured in China or printed in the Chinese language.  Yu-Gi-Oh cards are only printed in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese.  The cards seized at GenCon SoCal were Chinese counterfeits.

2. Check and make sure that the hologram located in the lower right-hand corner has the Eye of Anubis on it.

3. To approximate the special surface Upper Deck puts on its cards, counterfeiters often apply multiple layers of coating with the result that the counterfeit cards can actually feel thicker than the real ones.

4. The back of every card should have 'Konami' in the top left-hand corner and Yu-Gi-Oh Trading Card Game in the bottom right-hand corner.

5. Counterfeiters often misspell 'Konami' and the name of Yu-Gi-Oh's creator, Kazuki Takahashi.