Diamond Fraudsters Can’t Crack This One Thing

Tricksters are getting better at imitating inscriptions on diamonds — but there’s still one feature of the laser engraving that they can’t duplicate, says Dr. Wuyi Wang of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). 

“In the early days, the fake inscription was of a very poor quality,” Dr. Wang, GIA’s vice president of research and development, said on Rapaport’s latest GEMTalks episode, which aired last Tuesday live on LinkedIn. “It’s getting better and better.” 

It’s now possible to mimic the GIA’s font and style, the gemologist explained. Earlier this year, the GIA spotted a treated yellow diamond that carried a forged report number for a naturally colored yellow diamond. The engraving was “almost identical to the real inscription,” he said. 

“You would not be able to tell just visually the fake from the real GIA inscription,” Dr. Wang said. “They matched the font size and even the style…[and] the laser beam control pretty well to what we are using. So, somebody paid attention to create a good match of a fake inscription.” 

However, it’s impossible to copy the way the inscription relates to the girdle features, such as the facet junctions, he pointed out. Those features are random, so even if a fraudster happens to get one of them right, he’ll probably get others wrong. 

“I haven’t seen a single fake inscription that matched everything with the real one yet,” Dr. Wang recalled. 

The GIA takes an image of a diamond’s inscription as soon as it is made, showing how the numbers line up with the facet junctions, Dr. Wang explained in conversation with Joshua Freedman, senior analyst at Rapaport. This enables it to verify whether a diamond has a genuine GIA inscription. The organization has developed the GIA Match iD device to automate this. 

Watch the video of the event here: 

This episode of the GEMTalks LinkedIn Live is brought to you by GIA — the Gemological Institute of America — protecting consumers and supporting the global gem and jewelry trade since 1931 through research, education and laboratory services.