Maureen,
I just watched a episode of BBC´s "Fake or Fortune". The episode about Van Meegeren, one very famous "Faker". He painted fakes of paintings from masters from mid 1600.
One very intresting thing was that Scotland yard tells that today between 40-50% of all paintings sold are most likely fakes.
They also interviewed a faker who had done time for these things and had painted alot of fakes. He said that still about 120 of his fakes were ones where the buyers did not know these were fakes. He could point them out and told them he painted them but he did not want to because the buyers had paid 30 000 pounds for them.
It started with that he painted one for a customer for 250 pounds and the customer took this to an auctionhouse and they took it in with a starting bid of 25 000 pounds.
So this makes me think that regarding many of the rare smurfs I would guess many many many are fakes. It is so much easier to fake a Fix Foxi smurf compared to a painting. Same with the painted variations.
My guess is that a lot more than 50% are fakes.
Regarding these Bully raws it was from a seller who did not now much about smurfs and figurines. Also these matches very well and seems very genuine and I think the onemold Bully is pretty much harder to fake because of the net compared to many others??
And regarding the raws I think there off course are a lot of fakes also.
Frank, the price they went for was 242 euros. This included 115 smurfs so maybe if I had been on my watch it could have been worth it. Unfortunatly the rest of the smurfs were not in the best shape so it would have been like paying all the amount on the raws. ???