In life, there are hard choices that each of us have to make during our lives. Alan recently had to pick between two very bad choices over a used 1996 Les Paul Gibson guitar. He traded a new Michael Kelly Patriot Custom in order to receive this Les Paul Gibson. The choice, unfortunately, was not about the trade but what happened over an Ebay auction.

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009, Mike checks our Ebay responses for the 1996 Les Gibson guitar. We'd already gotten a thousand dollar bid on the guitar and the first response was a guy from Austrila looking to see if we could mail it to him. However, the second response was a very sour note on our hopeful moods that this 1996 Les Paul Gibson. 'It's a fake,' proclaimed the Ebayer, 'there's three screws on the headstock, there should be two.' Mike and I looked at each other after we read the list of impurities and sins that our Les Paul Gibson was being accused of having.

'We can prove our guitar is a normal Gibson, after all the guy we traded it from stated that he had sent it to Gibson and had it checked to be a real one!' I declared at the sight of the condemning comment. So our quest began, we started looking at pictures of regular Gibson guitars. There were a few things that the Ebayer had stated that were counterfeit but they were on real Gibson guitars, we felt assured with righteous indignation that our guitar was a real one. That was until we started looking through the Gibson's news post about counterfeit guitars that were being made and sold from dealers in China. Fake Gibsons vs Real Gibsons

Mike even went so far as to research the serial number. Yes, the serial number is to a 1996 Les Paul Gibson, but the place it was made was a factory that only made acoustic guitars. This 'Les Paul Gibson' is an electric guitar.

It was a most unfortunate finding, our guitar was most definitely a fake. We even went through uncovering truss rod cover and pot cover, both were identical to the pictures on the Gibson's website. We found ourselves at a crossroad, we already had a bid on this 1996 Les Paul 'Gibson' guitar, but we didn't want to sell a fake to an unsuspecting customer. Those were the two choices: either lose money or lose our reputation as a good seller.

Alan struggled with the decision. But in the end, he decided that is was better to lose money than to sell something that we know as being fake to an unsuspecting customer. That's think kind of store keeper that I appreciate working for, the one who weights being honest over making money.