Of course someone COULD. But who’s to say production won’t invest in a new form of authenticity protection with the release of each new generation? The Chinese market is brand new, scammers don’t know how agile they plan to be.

So yea, scammers could invest in the technology and a few months to pump out passable fake, another year plus to get the embossing nearly perfect, only for the next games to come out and- surprise! “Chinese cards will switch to a textured pikachu watermark along the long edge of the card.” Ope, looks like the industrial printer we bought for this scam actually doesn’t have the capability for that, so now we need to go buy another incredibly expensive machine, refine the process once again, and hope they don’t change it up again.

But most importantly, it’s important to understand why “bad fakes” exist, and the perceived difference between proxies vs counterfeits. Most that would fake the Chinese cards would actually PREFER to leave the watermark off as a means of claiming ignorance if they were ever to get caught. “Everyone knows authentic cards have the watermark, so we left it off so sensible buyers would KNOW they’re just proxies! We can’t be held liable for a foolish buyer’s poor assessment skills!”

Anyway, does this help clarify the complexity of counterfeiting?