What comes around goes around, right? It was very satisfying to read that Roger Hooper had been arrested for selling bogus items. The Cumberland County district attorney has charged Hooper with deceptive business practices, according to the Patriot News.

I first learned about Hooper in 2002 when Bob Lemke wrote about a ton of counterfeit 1963 Bazooka cards that were flooding the market from an eBay user known as "bassmaster." Yes, you guessed it, Hooper. There were also counterfeit 1921 W551 strip cards, 1931 W517 strip cards, 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread and 1952 Wheaties to name a few more. And to top it all off, there was even a fake grading company, FGA that encapsulated the counterfeits and further deceived the public. Guess who was the founder and owner of FGA? Yes, Hooper.

Back then, Hooper blamed it on a business partner named Randy Howard, who was in control of his eBay username, although it was registered to Hooper. Hooper claimed he purchased the cards from a dealer at a show. Nobody saw the dealer, was able to identify him and, of course, he paid cash so there were no records of a transaction. It was almost like he printed them himself, put them in his own graded slab and sold them.

After lying relatively low for a few years, Hooper was back in the middle of another huge counterfeit scheme, which was very similar three years ago. Several different eBay sellers seemed to have endless quantities of rare SLU cards, Star Co. cards, Sportscasters and rare minor league cards, like Rickey Henderson, Cal Ripken and Roger Clemens. And they were selling them in GEM and GEM Elite holders. The eBay usernames were "inserts4collectors", "sportscardzz", "shaqfu1", "cavsking" and "jtgcards". The link was a yahoo.com seller named Randy Howard that had a very nice mix of the fakes from 2002 and the fakes from 2005. Hooper and Howard were at it again.

In both cases, the primary image for the card was used, then the fonts, borders, etc. were rebuilt to make the card look pretty convincing unless you had a real one to compare it to. I spoke with Det. Sgt. Earl Brock, who's leading the investigation, a couple days ago and he told me many other things they found in Hooper's warehouse, from tons of resealed packs (with more glue sticks than the average person would use in 10 lifetimes), to fake autographs, to labels from various grading companies, including FGA, Capitol, GEM and Gem Elite, along with other stuff I can't talk about quite yet.

They have frozen all of Hooper's assets and have access to all of his accounts so if they can just locate payments to a printing press, they'll have the smoking gun. Until then, it's very tough to prove he knowlingly committed fraud. If you've ever dealt with Hooper and been ripped off...I should say, if you are aware you were ripped off, because almost everyone that has dealt with him has been ripped off, please call Det. Bock and try to document your losses. His number is 717-240-77764. Don't let the guy behind virtually every counterfeit sports card in the past six years walk.

One more point I want to make is there's a reason why I pictured the Star Co. cards in this blog. It's because three years after we wrote about it, bigboydsportscards3 is STILL selling these on eBay (the Jordan on the top is the fake and here's a link to his auction for the exact same fake card...you compare). After I've talked to him and told him they were fake and after the ring leader has been arrested. If you've purchased any Star Co. cards from Terry Boyd, please call me (800-726-9966 ext. 13383) because it's time we start building a case against him.