Buying · Protection · Interactive Tool
目利き

The Fake-Listing Checker

Paste the claims from any knife listing, steel, construction, origin, price, and get a verdict grounded in market reality. Steel has a market price, Japanese labor has a market price, and no seller has repealed either. This tool checks whether the story and the number can both be true.

Claims and signals in the listing (check all that apply)
This tool checks a listing's claims against documented market floors and the tells published in our fake-spotting guide and our price-anatomy guide. It cannot authenticate a physical knife, a passing listing can still be fake, and an honest etched-pattern knife sold as decorative is a legitimate product. Price floors are street-price observations and Okami estimates as of August 2026. When in doubt, verify the seller: a counterfeit cannot reach you through a brand's own store or authorized dealer.
How It Works

The logic, in the open

No black box: every rule this tool applies is published prose on this site, converted to arithmetic. The core price floors, from the fake-spotting guide:

  • VG-10 has a floor. The least expensive genuine VG-10 knives from reputable makers, small petties in entry lines, start around $50 to 60 street; a full-size VG-10 gyuto from a known maker runs roughly $100 and up. "VG-10" at $25 means the steel claim is false or something else is.
  • Layered cladding has a floor. Genuine damascus cladding means a laminated billet, more grinding, more finishing; it appears on real knives starting well north of $100. Below that, expect an etched pattern.
  • Hand forging does not scale. Thousands of units sold, dispatched in 48 hours, at commodity prices is not describing hand work honestly.
  • Japan has Japanese wages. Genuinely Japanese-made kitchen knives from known factories start around the price of a decent restaurant dinner, not a sandwich.
  • Powder steel and single-bevel geometry raise floors further (Okami estimates, labeled in the results): powder metallurgy grades cost the maker several times what commodity stainless does, and single-bevel knives carry hours of asymmetric hand grinding.
  • The rule underneath all of them: when one spec is impossible, distrust every spec. A seller who lies about the steel is not telling the truth about the hardness, the layers, or the origin.

The seller signals (untraceable smiths, wallpaper kanji, repeating patterns, unnamed marketplace sellers) come from the same guide's kanji, pattern, and seller sections. They are probabilistic, and the tool weighs them that way.

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