Does anyone know about Silver Cloud shop? Is it still in business? Do they use NA artists? When I type in the name to do research on it, I get links to people selling jewelry from SC.
try this: silver cloud inc nm
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That works. Thanks bud. But it doesn’t seem like they have many Native American looking items. I have a ring that looks NA with their hallmark…so I was trying to find out more about them.
Maybe it is Sharon Cisco…
But then…here is the exact same ring and they called it Silver Cloud.
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No cloud on my ring so I will go with Sharon Cisco. Billie the Kid auctions would seem to be more reliable than EBay. 
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I’m finding Sharon Cisco attributed marks but not circled?
not listed in Hougarts
The ring is just like others attributed to Sharon Cisco. no one would go through the trouble of producing work like that and label it as someone else’s. Perhaps it is someone working under her or just a variation of her hallmark.
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Usually fakes aren’t the same quality as the original, correct? I don’t think her rings sell that high that one can actually make a big profit from her name. The turquoise and coral are real and the work is very nice. So if it’s a fake…I’ll take it !!
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True @nanc9354 . However, some fakes are quite good and likely are designed to prey on the novice collector. Place the items in a SW shop with all the trimmings and customers would feel comfortable purchasing there.
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@StevesTrail The article Steve posted stated that 2 AZ jewelry stores were involved with this fraudulent scheme. That’s beyond the pale.
“big profit”!?!? gee,aside from stealing somebody’s work even once ,think of it being done hundreds…thousands of times.
you’d buy a crook-bred mutt ,w/a cutsie lie stuck on it too?
I know that it is a big business and a felony. What I meant to say is that if you are going through the trouble of making the jewelry in a very similar way to someone else, you would do that on a name that brings in a lot of money just for the name. I do not think Sharon Cisco’s name carries that weight. That is all I meant to say. 
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I’ve said this on here previously, but I’ll mention it again. My nephew in ABQ is a fed, and when he first got there ('20) he worked on a big Native American jewelry fraud case. This one involved a couple stores in NM (ABQ and Santa Fe I think). So when we visited him in '21, he kept telling me how careful I needed to be; I am not sure he trusted my judgement The stores involved were not ones mentioned in my Trading Post Guidebook, which is what I have followed through the years. I think the Santa Fe store was some big one on the plaza. You can never be too careful.
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Very unnecessary comment.
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i think the problem is block letter stamps can be bought and applied by anyone, and uneducated buyers can guess their way into their own attributions with zero effort on the fraudulent maker’s part. the well known Glodove (?) makers in the Phillippines are amazing silversmiths in their own right but they know they can make more money mimicking random (or specific) Native American work and exporting it to the US than they can marketing their own designs as Phillippines. They know the styles and techniqes - i mean, we have hundreds of books outlining how our best and brightest make their pieces and cataloging their work- and they just copy it.
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@Jemez22 Boy howdy. Well said.
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@Jemez2 is absolutely right about how a well-researched copy job can fool even a good eye. A trusted seller I do business with at the beach showed me some pieces he had that were from a Filipino artist and they were pretty dead on copies of NA jewelry. Thankfully he was honest in selling it as what it really was…Southwestern style but made in the Phillipines…but not everyone would be that truthful. He said that much of his clientele were casual tourist buyers who didn’t know the quality and wouldn’t pay what he was having to buy NA jewelry for these days (prices have gone up) and he’d had to buy more Asian-made stock.
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yup. and once those casual tourist buyers get those purchases home and tire of them, they sell them on ebay as genuine, either not knowing or not caring, seeing how the real stuff sells better than the import stuff… and bingo bango, we have bidders inflating the “value” of imports without realizing it, and google search becomes filled results with pages and pages of hallmark “attributions” (and turquoise IDs!) driven by sketchy ebay listings.
It doesn’t even have to be intentional on the seller’s part. as i see it, the problem is with the import laws - these pieces don’t have to be hard-marked with the origin country. they can be stickered (removeable) or hang-tagged (also removeable) when they enter the country.
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Agree 100%. And therein is why we should be verrrrry sceptical of stuff being sold on eBay and Etsy as Native American. I wish the owners of stores like this would stay away from purchasing things that completely imitate Native art.
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