Since probably February 2016 Ebay seller mjb2337 from New Jersey in the U.S.A has been selling very bad reproduction/replica plates from various Central America and Caribbean countries mostly. He has many, many copies of each plate. He is selling them as replicas/reproductions but I don’t think most buyers realize just how badly made they are.
I see he now has many more of these cheap pieces of rubbish.
The new list includes: Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Bonaire, Cayman Islands, St. Maarten, Puerto Rico, Egypt, Honduras, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela.
He seems to have taken most of the photos of genuine plates from the website www.plateshack.com/y2k/ (which is a wonderful site for checking what a genuine plate looks like, especially for American, Central American, Caribbean, etc. plates) and then had them printed on thin flat aluminium blanks. The genuine photos are mostly of plates on vehicles and have bolts, rivets, dirt and other typical genuine plate problems showing. These were then printed and the bolts, rivets, dirt etc. are therefore printed on the plate. On most of his replicas the slots are overlapping the holes or other slots on the genuine plate. It makes them look terrible and he has a very poor 93% rating on Ebay just now.
The photo of the Egypt plate he stole from a friend of mine’s Flickr pages.
I have bigger pictures of all of them available if anyone wants and if anyone knows others he had made, please let me know.
You would be better having pictures of plates in your collection than any of these pieces of rubbish.
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