We have be increasingly concerned by the illegal activities of a competitor for some months now. He has been selling fake "membership" of the order since early 2008. Because he is only a young man with a light-fingered approach to life and a laser printer in his bedroom, he is only capable of providing worthless documents which he has copied from us. In order to make him look like a sensible adult, Richard posted a photograph on his About Me page of Scott Farrell - from Scott's Chivalry Today site - and pretended it was a picture of himself! He has recently removed it under pressure from ourselves. Check out http://www.chivalrytoday.com/ to see Richard's light fingered approach to life.
Let us wind the eBay clock back and look at what Richard was selling before he started making fake copies of our "Order of the Black Ermine". The mainstay of his business 2 years ago, selling as Richard7298, was mainly second-hand clothing and he seems to have been quite successful in that fairly unprofitable but simple business. In the summer of 2007 he experimented with some dubious items of a slightly sexual nature, novelty Lairdships and then he hit on creating fake documents. He founded the "University of Parenting" and also listed fake University Degree Certificates "Fake Genuine Real University Degree Diploma Certificate". Not knowing what a real University Degree Certificate looked like, he offered them with the amusing benefit of a bar code. This basic error did not stop him selling lots of these bogus Degrees and he was clever enough to steal genuine crests from several Universities - totally ignoring the fact that these were their registered Trademarks. Finally, after some pressure from several angry Universities, eBay pulled the plug on his fake University Degrees.
He looked around for other fakes that he could sell to unsuspecting eBay customers and found a Knights Templar Certificate and our Order of the Black Ermine membership. We are so concerned about his continuing exploitation of eBay customers that we will now be supplying our genuine memberships only with a membership card and a certificate bearing a holographic seal (which he cannot duplicate). If your Certificate does not have a holographic seal, and it is dated later than July 2008 - it's a fake.
If you believe that you have been conned by Richard Holland, then you may wish to contact your local Office of Trading Standards, who have a duty to protect consumers from false claims by rogue traders.