Is Your Royal Blue Peanut Really Royal?

How can you be confident that your Ty Beanie Baby® plush toy is authentic? Most beanies are real, but recently there have been some news stories about counterfeit versions of rare Beanie Babies. Experts like Claudia Dunn at Mary Beth's Beanie World(tm) and various Beanie Baby web sites list some of the errors that can give away a reproduction. Many of these lists describe the more obvious problems that are relatively easy to discover once you know what to look for. These can be a great resource for collectors and can help you buy wisely. But some of the imitations out there are getting closer and closer to real thing and can be very hard to detect. Ty has acknowledged the problem and the new beanies will even come with hard-to-duplicate holographic tags. However, there is still some concern about the older, original Beanie Babies. If you are thinking about selling or purchasing an expensive beanie, you might want to consider a Beanie Baby authentication service.

Checking a seller's feedback rating and reading about their reputation is a great way to help you decide whether to bid on a beanie. An authentication service, like an escrow service, is another option that can provide an added degree of security for the buyer and help sellers be more successful since buyers can bid with added confidence.

Why authenticate? In addition to gaining greater credibility, authentication services can also help discourage counterfeiters. By dealing with the problem directly, authenticating can help maintain the long-term collectible value of beanies and support the growth of the hobby.

Authentication is a natural progression of a highly collectible hobby. For example baseball trading cards, antiques, and jewelry all have specialists that can rate and authenticate, so it should not be surprising that a number of authentication services have been created to assess beanies!

A place to have your rare beanies authenticated is with Peggy Gallagher Enterprises, Inc. (http://www.beaniephenomenon.com/authenticity.htm), and the cost per Beanie Baby is $25 plus shipping and insurance. Beanies are inspected by Peggy Gallagher and Paula Abrinko, who are both highly experienced Beanie Baby collectors. Peggy has also written two books on beanies and has another going into print soon. Peggy Gallagher Enterprises, Inc. carefully reviews Beanie Babies. It then registers authentic beanies and assign a numbered certificate of authenticity to each one. The authentic Beanie Baby with all tags is placed with its certificate in a clear Lucite box and sealed with a tamper evident seal. If a Beanie Baby is counterfeit or it is real with an altered or counterfeit tag, they notify the owner of this fact in writing.

Even though these services can be valuable, especially for those rare beanies, it is important to remember that the vast majority of beanies are real.

As part of our effort to ensure a safe trading place, this article is provided to inform and to find out if people in our eBay community are interested in learning more about authentication services. Let us know what you think on the Bean Bag chat board.

Please note that neither of the services mentioned in this article is associated with or endorsed by Ty Inc.