In Pennsylvania I've seen sealed boosters with art of Holon Phantoms and Delta Species. The boosters looked pretty good. When I saw them, they looked a little suspicious like they had been resealed. But when opened, there were just fake cards in a fake pack. They weren't resealed, just reproduced. I've even spotted cards in a little box, about the size of a deck of playing cards. This version had a little hole at the top so that it could be hung on store racks, and it also had embossed artwork with a foily background! You find these kind of fake cards at shady little stores that sell stuff starting at a dollar an only going to a moderately low amount of money. Those stores usually have other bootleg merchandise featuring Spongebob and kid stuff like that. My TO at my last City Championships was rambling on about the fake cards. She pointed out that one way to tell a fake is to rip one of the cards to reveal its center layer, and if you don't see a dark streak going down, it is probably a fake. But I don't need to do that, and I'm sure a lot of other people don't, but that nice trick could help the people that haven't been looking at these cards for a large portion of their life. I noticed that the fake cards don't have the same kind of waxy and glossy texture to them as a real card. They don't slide as smoothly while sifting through them. My biggest concern with these fakes is people selling them on eBay unknowingly (or worse, knowingly) and then me recieving them and not knowing what to do! I think I'll only be buying newly released cards from people I can trust. Unless the card clearly has an authentic holofoil appeal visible in the picture.
If you see a box of cards for $25, you know something is fishy.
Oh, and PokePop, I haven't even seen cards sold out of packs here. What are those cards, and what are they distributed in? Are they just loose singles or something like that?