| 06/01/2022 | So, I recognize that I've shut myself almost completely outside the modern circle of collectors, from my refusal to join a social media platform. However Jim Leonard was kind enough to contact me and inform me that we have a newly discovered counterfeiter in our midst. I'm passing the information along to anyone else who might not have heard.
Enrico Ricciardi, also known as LordBritishDragon, was recently caught selling fake copies of rare Ultima and Sierra games, with a trail of suspicious activity that goes back almost a decade. The details are available in a Google Doc, with detailed photographs and notes on how the fakery was identified, mostly by comparing the materials and printing techniques against known originals, and the fact that the disks/cassettes were either blank or had non-game material recorded on them, in a callback to the Eyal Katz forgeries. It's sickening to me that we can't trust other collectors, but once again greed has brought out the worst in one of our own. If you have ever traded or purchased rare items from Enrico Ricciardi, you should consider your items highly suspect, especially if they are ultra-rare pieces (Akalabeth, Escape from Mt Drash, early Sierra Hi-Res Adventures). And if you're considering buying anything like this... unfortunately you're taking your chances. Ask lots of questions. Where the seller got it from. Where that person got it from. Detailed pictures of everything. For the record, I consider a small number of Eyal Katz sympathizers from back in the day to be partially responsible for this. Their hassling me on the old SWCollect forum every time I refused to trust Katz may have contributed to Enrico realizing he could get away with it too.
Enrico, I'd love to hear what you have to say for yourself. But you'll have to contact me, as I have no way to contact you. Because I refuse to join a social media platform. |
| 01/06/2022 | I feel dreadful. I'm pretty sure I've caught some variation of COVID. Apologies for any delay in responding or mailing out packages in the next few days. |
| 01/01/2022 | Holy poopness, was 2021 ever a Sisyphean year.
Apologies for the long hiatus. The Shoppe is back open now, albeit with one major change: The automated offer acceptance feature has been disabled. All offers, cash or trade, now need to be manually approved by the Shoppekeeper. The reason for this is that I discovered a few too many people using me as a cheap source for items they could flip in auctions, similar to what happened with BetterThanTheBay after I first launched it. I don't always have the time to keep up with price fluctuations, and it started to feel like I would quickly get taken advantage of whenever a spike occurred. New year, fresh start, so I won't go on yet another rant about the evils of The Auction Site Which Must Not Be Named, but I am going to start putting more emphasis on selling to other collectors, rather than resellers. Resolutions and all that. If it helps, think of it as me placing less trust in automated technology. That's a good theme for 2022, I think, as we collectively slide further along the dystopian timeline. Lots of new items are listed, including a few BetterThanTheBay auctions, so please take a look and let me know if anything interests you. P.S. Please give a belated welcome to Purry and Bug, the new official mascots of the Shoppe, replacing Beandip who departed in late 2020.
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