MV Cards
REAL OR FAKE?
SCHLUMBERGER TEST CARDS?
Many Schlumberger test cards have appeared recently on collectors market, apparently produced for several different countries, and they are often sought after and valued high; however, most of them are not real.

A percentage of about 80, 90% of these cards are fake, unfortunately quite hard to identify. These cards are in fact reproduced almost perfectly, and most of them report the name of a Country whose cards are hard-to-get, such as Somalia, or other African countries. The problem comes when some real test cards have been really produced for that countries, so that understanding the difference between a rare test card and a simple fake is not easy at all.
The first fake cards produced had dummy chips embedded on them, so a simple chip-reader machine could help to identify them. But recently the production has refined, and fake cards are produced with chips that are read as original by chip-readers. Of course, this is not possible for countries like Somalia, where, as far as we know, any test has been gone on trial by Schlumberger.
We'll try to keep you informed on developments, updating this page when we get news, in the meantime our suggestion is to be very cautious with these cards, keeping in mind that actually neither any chip card reader nor the Moreno logo can guarantee the autenticity of a card. The cards reproduced here have a SC-7 contact, however we know the existence of fake cards with SC-4 and SC-5 contacts, while any fake cards with SC-6 have been reported yet. The printing on the cards seems to be like ink-jet, quite easy to be damaged.

   
   

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