How to Spot a Fake 1985 Star #101 Jordan in a Fake PSA Holder

A reader recently sent me photos of this supposed PSA-graded Star #101 Jordan and asked about its authenticity.

At first glance, it definitely looked fake to me.

As a reminder, here’s an authentic #101 Jordan front and back.

While I don’t have the card in hand, the biggest tells only from the photos were the poor quality of the front of the card. You can see this the best on the font for Jordan’s name where the letters lack clarity, very common for fakes, especially with a low quality print.

Now, with the fake slab, this stuck out like a sore thumb to me, but we can go to PSA’s website to see what the actual slab should look like.

I went to the PSA Cert lookup page and found the actual images of the card.

Here are the photos from PSA’s website:

While the counterfeiters got close to the slab, they screwed up a few things. The most noticeable for me are the bar codes on the front and back of the slab.

Here’s the customer’s card barcode from the front of the slab.

And here’s the barcode from the real PSA slab

Take a look at the pattern, and if we compare, we can see that they absolutely do not match. Case closed.

The back barcode is also not correct.

Here’s the fake back barcode

And here’s the real one. Note that the PSA logo is missing on the real one. And look at the QR code in the top right. The corners of the QR code are completely different.

I hope this helps anyone in trying to identify and #101 cards in a fake PSA slab.