A Certificate of Authenticity otherwise known as a COA is designed to guarantee that an autograph or a product is totally genuine.
However with the amount of abuse of COA’s which accompany fake autographs most of the COA’s you will ever come across aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.
A COA to an Autograph dealer is worthless as they will want to view/or have the autograph viewed to decide for themselves if the autograph is genuine.
All this being said a lot of people do like to receive a COA. One reason for this could be perhaps if the autograph is for someone else, perhaps a present, then you may not want to pass on the receipt as it will contain personal information. Or maybe because it can be a good way of keeping a record of where you got your autographs from. CB Autographs will issue a Certificate of Authenticity with every autograph with a unique reference number for that autograph. COA’s a side when making a claim with any autograph dealer what is valuable is a dated receipt, not the COA.
When shopping on auction sites the COA in majority cases is nothing more than a sales pitch. A Certificate of Authenticity does not make a fake autograph a genuine autograph.
In almost all cases when buying an autograph the source is far more important than if it comes with a Certificate of Authenticity. For more information on Authenticity please see the Autographs Authenticity section.
