Spotting Fakes, before the money moves.

Most current Pop Mart boxes carry an anti-counterfeit label — a code you are meant to check against the company's own records. It is a real safeguard and it is also the check collectors lean on hardest, which is exactly why it is the first thing a counterfeiter copies. A printed code costs nothing to reproduce. What it buys the copyist is the thing that matters most: your confidence, spent before you have looked at the figure at all.

So verify it the way a code is meant to be verified. Open the company's own app or type its address in yourself, then enter the code by hand. Never let the label take you where it wants to go — a lookalike verification page is a morning's work for someone who has already tooled a mould. And read the answer properly: a code that reports as already verified is a code somebody has copied off a genuine box, and it is telling you so.

Which leaves the four checks in the drawing below, and they are the ones a copy cannot argue with. The seam, where the two halves of the mould met: on a genuine figure the join is dressed flush and you feel nothing under a fingernail, while a cheap tool leaves a step and a sliver of flash along it. The paint edge, which on a factory piece stops dead in the sculpt groove it was designed to stop in, and on a copy wanders across it with a haze of overspray beyond.

Then the two that need no more than a phone camera and good light. The foot stamp is cut into the tool itself, so on the real thing it is even, deep and sitting on one baseline; a copy taken from a moulding of a moulding comes out shallow, soft at the corners and out of line, often with paint filling half of it. And the box print: a licensed carton is printed fine and in register, while a copy shows a coarser dot, a channel walked off the others, and edges that go soft where they should be hard. Look at the object, in that order, and the code becomes what it should always have been — the last confirmation, not the first.