This band's not even close. Even the least frequent cigar smoker might look at this band and become suspicious, because the counterfeiter has nearly everything wrong. The gold bordering that should run consistently along the outskirts of the band is so bad that most of the band's top has no border at all, and the red vertical lines bleed in the gold. The centerpiece is deficient of any true detail. The font for "Hoyo de Monterrey Habana" is fatter and blurrier than the genuine article and the words are off-center. If that isn't enough, the word "Monterrey" is misspelled.

There's more. The size of this imitation band is also wrong, and the quality of the paper stock is terribly poor. There's no embossing, either. The only positive element about this counterfeit cigar band is that the person who submitted it to "Counterfeit Gallery" knew how bad the forgery truly was. He told us the submission was for "humor only," but for anyone duped by an inauthentic cigar, there's not much to laugh about. Except maybe this one.