Who Makes The Slabs (And Where)

Have you seen the differnt generations of the fake slabs? The first ones were easy to spot, even easier to identify if you had them in hand. But they have been getting better and better. The slabs shells themselves are now VERY good.

And you might be surprised what the injection molding plants would know about how the molds are manufactured. Most if not all of them have their own mold shops and they have a great deal of experience in the making of these molds. I would be very surprised if their their mold makers could not duplicate the PCGS molds. Maybe not on a first attempt but after a couple of tiem they would get it right (which just so happens to be what has happened with the fake shells.)



Sounds about right. Prices have come down, used to be around $10K per mold. This is why the fly by night grading services didn't proliferate until Coin World began marketing their own shells and then when generic shells became available. The basement slabbers couldn't afford to have their own shells made.

Slabs is soilent green, that's why they don't tell you.

I'll try and have a look at the Kickstarter videos. Might get a better understanding of what is now possible with counterfeit moulds.

Can't tell you who makes them but I can give you patent info on the holder itself, patented by Keith Love, founder of ICG and ex CEO (retired now) and has since sold the business to go into injection mold projects. http://patents.justia.com/patent/6029807

Here is a patent that is for a device to allow various non compatible holders to mate together for stacking, in it, it lists many of the other slab patents.
http://www.google.com/patents/US20120189384

From the above list I'm sure you can dig deeper, then use cross reference information to figure out at the least how is capable of making them in the USA, the volume must be at least 100K units per month and probably a lot more.

You are correct BStrauss3, I did not mean to imply he owned the patent to all certified holders, but re-reading my post makes it sound like that was the intention. I meant he came up with a patent on the holders that most of the other TPGs now use for security reasons. The other TPGs probably pay him a small usury fee or royalty. Before he started ICG he worked at PCGS in the early days, back when they used the small thin holders. I still haven't read through all 20 cited patents yet, and may never do so, because I am not all that interested personally.

Sorry for any confusion on my part in the previous post. I didn't mean to imply that he was the inventor of the certified holder at all.

I am speaking as an american law-talking guy: you go one of two mutually exclusive ways for IP protection: Patents (which are a quid pro quo - the govt gives you a monopoly in exchange for your disclosing to the public the advance in science to which you contributed). The con to that is that the monopoly is the term. 20 years from filing (picking the easiest example).

Consider a trade secret, as long as it meets certain criteria (one of which is to keep them secret and their use is to maintain a competitive advantage), as long as those conditions are maintained, the trade secret is valid and I wouldn't want to be the defendant accused of divulging them. Think Coca Cola recipe. There is no patent on it; it is a trade secret.

It is only possible to sue someone (or prosecute) for divulging a trade secret if you have either signed a confidentiality agreement or have engaged in an illegal act to access the information. I think we have all read about people throwing out documents that should of been shredded and that information ends up in the public domain, or people sending confidential emails to their entire contact list.
Also "Federal law" only extends so far, you cannot prosecute the counterfeiters in China as they are not in US jurisdiction and trade laws are different outside the US.