This week someone paid about $1,000 on eBay for an allegedly fake Apple employee badge masquerading as the 1977 ID of employee number 10.
The employee badge is a convincing phony, according the an intrepid blogger and the longtime Apple employee (number 8) he contacted to confirm the forgery. And the proof of provenance the blogger sought from the seller appeard to be fake, too, according to several sources.
Fake Apple badge from 1977 fetches $1,000 on eBay
On May 12 an eBay bidder snagged what they probably thought was a fascinating bit of history — the 1977 Apple employee card for employee number 10, Sherry Livingston. The buyer paid $946 plus $55 shipping. The card came with an office map for the company’s first corporate address on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, said to be hand-drawn by employee number 8, Chris Espinosa.
But Espinosa, who began working with Apple at age 14 and is still employed there, called BS on the auction when a blogger asked him about it. That blogger, Cabel Sasser, initially believed the items to be genuine when he came across them via a Mastodon post from Eric Vitiello. But something seemed off and Sasser started digging.
“The scuffing looked … sandpapery,” he wrote. “The splotches on the map felt overcooked. And I couldn’t stop looking at the “typewritten” part … This badge would’ve been (obviously!) made before desktop publishing. A badge template would’ve been printed by a local printing company, then fed into a typewriter to type the individual employee details. And that typed text is suspiciously uniform.”
Enter Chris Espinosa, Apple employee number 8
Photo: [email protected]
And then he saw a post from Espinosa calling the items phony. “That’s … fake. Both of them,” Espinosa wrote, referring to the badge and office map. So Sasser got in touch with Espinosa.
Here’s Espinosa’s reply, concisely ticking off his first-hand knowledge indicating the items’ phoniness:
That’s not Sherry Livingston.
That wasn’t taken with a Polaroid with a flash.
The laminate dimensions are all wrong.
That’s a computer font, not an IBM Selectric Orator type ball.
That’s not my original sketch, which was on a National engineering pad.
Seller provides (obviously fake) proof
Photo: [email protected]
But the story doesn’t end there. Sasser decided to confront the seller. And, as he describes in his blog post, loaded with images, Mastodon posts and snaps of actual chats, the seller tried to confirm the provenance of the items with another allegedly fake item.
The seller claimed to have purchased the items from the German Red Cross and provided a receipt dated 2001. But sources on Mastodon quickly helped Sasser show that was fake, too, and probably hastily made that very day.
