Two men pleaded guilty last week to federal charges stemming from a 15-year operation that prosecutors said bartered fake baseballs and bats purportedly signed by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner and Cy Young.
Brothers Donald and Mark Henkel, both Michigan residents, each pleaded guilty to one charge — mail fraud and wire fraud, respectively — according to documents filed with the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois. Prosecutors had alleged the men used vintage pens to forge signatures, created false provenances and used co-conspirators to pose as “straw sellers” who verified fake item histories.
In their plea agreements, the Henkel brothers admitted to devising and participating in “a scheme to defraud and to obtain money from victims, including art galleries, auction houses, and individual buyers … by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses and concealment of material facts.” The documents cite examples in which the brothers created false provenances for baseballs or bats that they later sold for about $120,000. Overall, Donald and Mark Henkel admitted to fraudulent conduct that caused $780,000 and $332,500, respectively, in financial loss to victims.
The case is one of several criminal investigations into alleged memorabilia fraudsters that have forced collectibles industry companies to examine and alter the practices that ensure authenticity of items on the market. While collectibles fraud isn’t a new phenomenon, industry experts say fraudsters recently have exploited an explosion in consumer interest in memorabilia since the pandemic, paired with the ability to sell fake material across a variety of platforms.
“We have to be vigilant, we have to be aware,” said Ryan Hoge, president of grading and authentication at Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA). “And if [we] start seeing different styles or large quantities of something where the style is slightly off, we’ll circle the wagons.”
Hoge added that “where there’s money to be made,” alleged bad actors will find a way to profit.
Other alleged fraud cases
In February 2025, authorities in Indiana began investigating Mister Mancave LLC, a business founded by Brett Lemieux, who allegedly sold counterfeit sports memorabilia via an online store and other means. Westfield police said they found a “significant” amount of evidence at his properties, including documentation and other items related to the counterfeit operation.
While he was being investigated, Lemieux wrote an online post claiming to have sold more than 4 million items for more than $350 million over the past 20 years.
In the post, Lemieux said he recreated holograms made by Fanatics, TriStar, James Spence Authentication (JSA), Panini and Steiner Sports. He also claimed to spend eight hours a day at an autopen machine forging signatures, faking Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Barry Bonds and Willie Mays collectibles. He said he “put out 80,000” fraudulent Kobe Bryant items when Bryant died in 2020.
“Even if he did 10% or 20% of [what he claimed], it’s still an insane number,” said Steve Grad, a principal authenticator at Beckett Authentication Services, which agreed to be acquired by PSA’s parent company in December.
Shortly after Lemieux posted on social media, authorities found him dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Westfield police told ESPN last week that the Lemieux case is “still being examined/analyzed” and that they’ve enlisted authentication companies to review seized items, which are being held at the department.
“There have been millions of dollars of sales with potentially tens of thousands of victims,” said Westfield’s assistant chief of police Billy J. Adams. “The intent at some point is to have some victim fund — how that will be conducted is still unknown, or if it is even possible.”
In a separate case, two individuals were charged with trademark counterfeiting, a third-degree felony in Texas, in January 2025 after Collin County Sheriff’s Office investigators found “fictitious certificates of authentication and thousands of sports memorabilia items that were falsely represented as genuine” at a home in McKinney, Texas.
Wendell Gidden-Rogers and Lisa Skolnick allegedly produced and sold counterfeit footballs, basketballs, baseballs, helmets and jerseys that had fake authentication stickers bearing the names of established companies in the industry, according to a lawsuit filed by Beckett against the two individuals in March 2025, alleging trademark infringement and other claims.
Beckett claimed that Gidden-Rogers and Skolnick looked up serial numbers for sports items authenticated by Beckett and recreated those items by forging athlete signatures and applying fake stickers with the serial number found in Beckett’s database. The individuals used a Ghostwriter autopen machine, which can be programmed to sign a celebrity’s name, the lawsuit stated.
The “fraudulent scheme of selling fake sports memorabilia items bearing counterfeits of the Beckett Marks and seal threatens to undermine not only Beckett’s entire reputation, but the entire sports memorabilia industry,” Beckett said in the lawsuit.
In November, a judge in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Texas ordered Gidden-Rodgers and Skolnick to pay Beckett nearly $600,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.
Attorneys for Gidden-Rogers and Skolnick, and for Beckett, did not respond to requests for comment.
“We’re all trying to do better in terms of making sure people know the stuff is genuine, but people like Brett and Wendell throw a huge kink into it,” Grad said.
Collectibles industry reaction
Chris Ivy, Heritage Auctions’ director of sports auctions, called the cases a “black eye” for the industry and said his company spends “a lot of time” vetting the memorabilia it consigns. Often that means using photo-matching — a process that matches fibers, threads, stains or tags to historical photography archives — as well as physically inspecting and testing material and examining autographs.
As a result, about 20% to 30% of autographs don’t pass the company’s authentication process and only about 50% of game-worn items make it to auction, Ivy said.
“If it’s a game-used item, if it’s going to sell for $4,000 or less, we’re probably breaking even or losing money with the amount of time we’re spending vetting,” Ivy said.
Jason Masherah, president of The Upper Deck Company, said his company spends “an inordinate amount of time” patrolling fraud and copyright infringement.
“You’re not just watching eBay or card shows,” he said. “You’re looking at Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, sending cease and desists, prosecuting counterfeiters on a regular basis.”
Leaders at authentication companies and auction houses said they employ a range of tactics to combat fraud — sometimes in direct response to recent criminal cases. The hologram sticker, they said, is particularly important to protect.
“People see that hologram, if it’s Fanatics or whatever, and they’re going to buy [an item] thinking it’s real,” Grad said.
Zohar Ravid, Fanatics’ president of specialty business and new ventures, said the company’s fraud monitoring teams identified Lemieux at least two years ago and contacted marketplaces to shut down his accounts.
Around the same time, Ravid said, Fanatics changed its hologram. He said Lemieux wasn’t the sole reason; the company had identified other potential fraudsters and would have changed its hologram anyway. He said that, to the company’s knowledge, no one has yet been able to replicate the new hologram.
In 2021, Beckett Authentication Services started to use tamper-proof holograms, similar to the ones used by Major League Baseball’s authentication team. MLB uses self-destroying authentication stickers, which leave permanent marks behind in an attempt to remove them.
Masherah said the company uses matching holograms on its collectibles: “One on the item and one on the certificate of authenticity. A large majority of the fake items only have the hologram on the item, they never have the matching certificate. If you don’t have both holograms, there’s a problem.”
Card grader PSA links hologram certification numbers to images of the product; the company photographs every item that comes into its facilities. Even so, to further solidify the authentication process, PSA’s Hoge encourages signers to autograph memorabilia at the company’s headquarters, filmed by the company’s cameras.
“We have a massive library of exemplar signatures so we can compare, look at time periods, [see] how signatures evolve,” Hoge said. “We have tight controls on our materials, we don’t use a network of third parties — it’s keeping tight inventory controls on materials that could be used in fraudulent ways.”
The advent of the autopen has allowed fraudsters to generate mass amounts of fake material. But James Spence III, vice president of JSA, said autopens reproduce fake signatures almost too perfectly.
“It can draw it on a baseball, a football helmet, I’ve seen it on golf Masters pin flags — and the autograph is perfect,” Spence said. “But it’s not live ink, it’s not hand-signed. We’ve figured out ways of detecting this.
“You sign your name 20 times on a piece of paper and there’s lots of variation. That’s what we, authenticators, look for in determining validity in autographs.”
Other companies have taken a more drastic approach to solidify authentication.
Metabilia, a company that partners with NFL and NBA teams to sell game-used and autographed memorabilia, uses tamper-proof stickers outfitted with a tiny epoxy disc containing diamond nanoparticles.
“It’s invisible to the normal eye, it’s its own fingerprint,” said Nicole Johnson, the co-founder of Metabilia. “It’s indestructible.”
Another company, MatchWornShirt, partners with soccer clubs — including Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Chelsea, AC Milan and Bayern Munich — and a number of NBA teams to auction game-worn, signed jerseys to collectors, straight off players. The company uses a chip embedded in jerseys that uploads a digital certificate of authenticity and match-worn information to customers’ cell phones.
One authentication company, The Realest — founded in 2023 by Los Angeles Rams in-house DJ Scott Keeney — uses a proprietary chemical solution to identify its memorabilia. Other companies are also exploring the chemical tactic.
Nick Cepero, chief executive officer of Sports Trader Collectibles and former head of memorabilia at PWCC Marketplace, said too many collectors don’t do enough research before buying. He recalls a house he visited in Texas where, by his estimate, 99% of a collector’s 30,000 signatures were fake.
“It’s a difficult conversation,” said Cepero, a former consignment director at Heritage Auctions. “You see receipts: ‘I paid $3,000 in 1990 for a Babe Ruth autograph’ and now the company doesn’t exist.”
Upper Deck’s Masherah said he worries about how bad actors might respond to authenticity advancements.
“The trouble with preventing fraud is that, whenever there’s money involved, the fraudsters always evolve,” he said. “We’ve been looking at a lot of what we feel is game-changing technologies … and fraudsters have already developed pathways for that.”
