Recently, I found myself perusing some ads for vintage guitars:

• 1967 Telecaster – £6k
• 1952 Telecaster – £38k
• 1958 Stratocaster – £28k
• 1960 Les Paul £25k

Now, as we all know, where there is big money to be made, there is also a burgeoning fake market. Just think of all the guys you know who have come back from business trips to the Far East with a brand new ‘Rolex’ on their wrists. It’s no different for guitars, unfortunately.

I was talking to one of the UK’s acknowledged experts on vintage guitars a while ago and he gave me the shocking news whereby he reckons that over 70% of the so called ‘golden oldie’ guitars on the market are probably fakes of some sort. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the vintage Les Paul you’ve seen going for silly money could really be made of plywood with a very clever paint job; the fakers are a lot more subtle than that. It’s more likely that a guitar which is being sold as being ‘in original condition’ has in fact had some modifications or modern spares put on it at some point in its history and the seller has decided to keep this quiet or disguise it in some way. It might not sound too naughty, but in a market where certain instruments can fetch six figures at auction, it still amounts to fraud in the end.

One problem, it seems, is the media; whereas once upon a time the ‘special marks’ that vintage dealers look for on instruments to verify their age were a well kept secret. Now, things like Fender pick-up codes, neck and body dates and so on are all part of the public domain.

Faking a vintage guitar is really no more difficult than it is to fake period furniture. It often doesn’t have to be very good – just a bit of ageing here and there and the job is done, as far as the casual punter looking for a bargain is concerned. But the big money is in fooling the experts; providing a guitar with a fake set of credentials takes a lot of effort, but the rewards are worth it and so it happens.

Another expert in the field (who works for one of the major auction houses in London and New York) told me that they now have to go to inordinate lengths to ensure that the instrument they are selling is genuine and not the product of the faker’s workshop. I won’t go into all the details, because that would add more fuel to the fire, but inspecting guitars under special light to check for wood and finish that has been ‘matched and patched’ is not uncommon.

Another dealer told me that every vintage piece they take in is scrupulously photographed inside and out because it is a faker’s common ploy to buy an old instrument, strip it of its pick-ups, substitute them for something credibly similar and then return the guitar to the shop, crying ‘fake!’ themselves. Unless precautions like pre-sale photography are taken, money is returned to the buyer and the pick-ups are subsequently sold on for a considerable profit. It’s as clever as it is disturbing.

But one of the most cunning rackets I’ve come across recently was a guy who placed an ad in a national magazine for a 1957 Strat he was selling. The advert read very convincingly in that he was saying all the right things to verify the date of manufacture, but he wanted silly money for it – and when I say silly, I mean much too little for something potentially worth so much. He said this was because he wanted a quick sale – something which, again, is just about believable. But the phone number was the scam – it was one of those numbers that you dial and it costs you an absolute fortune while you wait to leave the seller a message on his answer phone. Very clever – there didn’t even have to be a guitar to catch people out on that one.

So basically, when it comes down to vintage instruments, if a deal sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not true at all!