A Sports Memorabilia Dealer Appeared To Confess To One Of The Largest Sports Memorabilia And Autograph Fraud Operations In History, Claiming Over $350 Million In Fraud
A bombshell has been dropped on the sports memorabilia and card industry over the last few days, Sports Collectors Digest details it all here. In the article it claims that a massive piece in the sports memorabilia and card industry, a man named Brett Lemieux basically wrote a manifesto on a Facebook page called "Autographs 101". He went on to detail how he he has ran a massive sports car scam. Selling millions of pieces and scamming people out of more than $350 million. These weren't just a little baseball card here or there, we're talking about memorabilia with "authentic" autographs from the biggest names in sports. Tom Brady, Aaron Judge, Patrick Mahomes, Derek Jeter, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, the list goes on and on. And if it could get any weirder, Lemeiux was found dead in one of the locations that police raided while investigating the story.
The Westfield (Ind.) Police Department raided two locations on Tuesday and Wednesday, loading semi-trucks with seized items. The department confirmed Wednesday night that it discovered a dead body at one of the locations. Police did not release the name of the individual, but confirmed that they died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Sports collectibles dealer Brett Lemieux published a post in the Facebook group Autographs 101 admitting to forging millions of athlete autographs and holograms over the past 20 years under the company name Mister Mancave.
“Mistermancave has sold over 4 million items. Yes million. Surpassed 350 million in sales,” Lemieux stated in his manifesto on Wednesday.
Longtime autograph authentication expert Steve Grad confirmed the raid and posted about it Wednesday on X.
An article from Fox 59 confirmed that the body located at the scene of the raid was Brett Lemieux AKA Mistermancave, who had made the following post on Facebook earlier this week where he admitted to this massive forgery and fraud case.
He goes into massive, massive detail talking about the companies he worked with and hoodwinked. The biggest names in the memorabilia and trading card world too, Fanatics, Panini, he admits it all. He even starts naming names of other folks who helped him do it and how they created the fake autographs. He goes on to mention a scheme going back many years that involved producing and selling millions of counterfeit autographs, holograms, authenticated stickers for all the monster athletes. He mentions that they released 80,000 fake Kobe items after he died, I mean what kind of person does that? Over 100,000 Tom Brady items were sold to the vendors too, how do you think all those fans in Boston are feeling with their likely fake 12 jersey now? He goes on to admit to faking and selling 95% of the Mahomes and Judge autos on the market. Said you should get any autograph from the last 25 years get checked for authenticity.
He also writes that the warehouse had been raided with $500-$700 million worth of product in it, and he let it happen. He's quite honestly admitting to everything while rubbing it in your face. The more you read the crazier it gets, he admits to wanting the companies like Fanatics to admit what has been going on and where the autographs came from, he calls out Michael Rubin for what he has done to the community as well. It's truly a crazy and demented story. He said he just wanted to do it to basically fuck people over and ruin the industry, which he may have done.
Steve Grad, a principal authenticator at Beckett and the co-owner of Grad Collection took to twitter to confirm the news that it had all gone down and talks about just how big this fraud ring was. You can tell how serious it is by Grad's tone, this is going to have monster impacts on the autograph and memorabilia community.
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I'm a card guy, I love a good card show (shoutout Slade shows every 2nd Saturday in GB), I have a decent PC of guys that I collect. I love pulling an auto out of a box, love watching the breaks, love checking eBay for deals on cards of my favorite players and guys that I've gotten to know. I don't have anything in the Kobe/Lebron/MJ/Judge/Mahomes tier, but I've got some big time O's auto'd cards. Now I am probably good and don't have to worry about it, but I've seen collections with hundreds of on-card autos from Judge, Ohtani, Jordan, Kobe….as the owners of those cards who has spent THOUSANDS of them, how do you sleep at night? How do you know if your stuff is legit or not or was it faked with a pen from Amazon that this guy and his cronies did.
It's a massive wakeup call in the community, lot of people could be out a lot of money if a lot of these turn out to be fakes. If this is all true, we're looking at one of, if not the biggest scams in U.S. History. This goes deeper than just a sports card story, this is a massive fraud operation that was run to perfection for decades. We'll see where the stories goes from here, but I have a feeling it's far from over.