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I've been a frequent user of Amazon's online service for a number of years now, the prices are reasonably good, the shipping costs are low (especially since I live in Australia where prices are extortionate) and the items are for the most part, genuine. This week I received three CD's directly from Amazon, not their affiliate retailers, but sold by Amazon at a few dollars more than the other retailers. All of them, ALL THREE are counterfeits! The artwork is meticulously replicated, but the big giveaway are the discs themselves. No matching serial code on the underside, blurry artwork on the labels, and shitty booklets, which are just one piece, folded in two as opposed to several pages. To the average person who probably doesn't care about the album cases, their authenticity would go unchecked and unverified. I like getting what I pay for, that means licensed music, in the packaging that was designed for it and with copyright shit all over it! I ordered a new copy of Prisoner of Azkaban because my last copy hadn't survived my early teenage years. I still have that CD in the case and everything, so I had something to compare my new copy with. The artwork and booklet are extraordinarily close to the real copy, barring the spine artwork which seems to have been flipped on both sides. A big clue that it wasn't authentic was that my new copy had no warner/sony logo embossed on the case, or on the underside of the disc ( the one that looks like this: \\' ) The discs also have no metatags, only those that are naturally copied from individual tracks, my ripping programs did not recognize them, where authentic CD's will be brought up in a few seconds when the software "gets" the CD (i.e. crosschecks online). My Fantastic Beasts Deluxe CD had what appeared to be authentic packaging, but the worst CD artwork ever - no codes on either of the two discs, so in this case it was doubly hard for anyone looking at the packaging to determine its authenticity. What this means is Amazon has no standards by which they can check authenticity - the person packing it certainly can't tell, and as recent articles on the fake CD's flooding the market seem to suggest, the genuine articles are bunched in with the counterfeit ones to make it near impossible to separate them without opening each one up. Older CD's are becoming harder to find especially if you're overseas, and of course you can find them in varying states of used conditions around the web, but if you want the real deal, new, or relatively new, you're fucked, and something like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would be one of the last things I expected to be counterfeit. So I'm only left with returning the CD's and getting refunds, but that doesn't solve my problem! I joked last night that by the time I find a genuine copy online, warner bros. will release the expanded scores! Has anyone experienced purchasing a CD to find it was counterfeit? p.s. whoever they hire to reproduce the fake artwork should be commended, the replications are uncanny! p.p.s. The other counterfeit CD I ordered from amazon was ironically Catch Me If You Can, a film about a conman who made very convincing passports, nametags and other personal documents...