The common tricks
The dominant trick in white tea is fake age, and it runs in two directions at once.
The first is a young tea stored hot and humid to darken it, then sold as aged.
The leaf goes brown, the wrapper looks right, and the cup is flat and slightly sour.
The second is simpler: a recent cake sold with an old date printed on the wrapper.
Pressed white only became common around 2010, so any cake claimed to be decades old is impossible.
The third is grade substitution, with Shou Mei sold as White Peony and White Peony as Silver Needle.
Origin is the fourth. Fuding is claimed almost universally and is true about half the time.
The fifth is loose aged white, easier to fake than a cake because there is no interior to check.
The last is marketing rather than fraud: descriptions using the words old and rare with no year attached.
All of them lean on the same weakness, which is that most buyers cannot date a cake by tasting it.
A cake pressed in 2015 is about eleven years old now, and one pressed in 2020 is six, which is young.
Why they work
Age claims are the hardest thing in tea to verify and the easiest thing to price.
A buyer who wants an aged cake has usually decided to believe the wrapper before tasting it.
The visual cues are easy to manufacture. Dark leaf and a brown liquor look like age to most people.
Damp storage produces those cues in months rather than years, which is the whole trick.
Grade substitution works because the three grades look similar to an untrained eye at a glance.
Silver Needle, White Peony and Shou Mei differ in bud ratio, and nobody counts buds before buying.
Origin is unenforceable outside China, and Fuding is used as a quality adjective by now.
Loose aged white has no format to check, so nothing contradicts the story.
Prices for aged white have risen, which made the whole thing worth doing properly.
The category is small and the buyers are new, which is the ideal condition for this trade.
Defence
Ask for the picking year and the pressing year separately, and write both down.
Break a cake and look at the interior before buying, if the seller will let you.
A pale interior under a dark surface means the colour was forced rather than earned.
Smell for sourness at the break. Real aged white smells sweet, and damp-stored tea smells sour.
Buy pressed rather than loose if you want something to keep, because a cake can be checked.
Count the buds. Silver Needle is buds only, and anything with leaf in it is not Silver Needle.
Compare the same grade from two sellers, which makes the bud ratio obvious very quickly.
Treat any cake said to be older than about 2010 as a young cake with an old date.
Ask where it was stored, since humid and dry storage produce different tea at the same age.
Keep the wrapper and your notes together, so that in five years you can check what you were told.
Fifty grams at 3 grams a cup is roughly 16 cups, enough to compare a fresh and an aged sample side by side.
When in doubt
When you cannot verify the age, pay the young price, because that is what you are getting.
A cake with an unknown storage history is worth what a young cake with good storage is worth.
Buy fresh white instead. It is cheap, easy to judge and hard to fake convincingly.
If you want aged, buy it young and store it yourself, which is slower and verifiable.
Do not pay a premium for a year, a county or a story you cannot check.
Ask the seller to open a cake and let you smell it, and watch how they react.
Buy the smallest quantity that lets you judge, which is 25 to 50 grams.
Avoid gift boxes of aged white entirely, since the packaging exists to hide the cake.
There is no shortage of white tea, so there is no reason to accept a claim you doubt.
Doubt costs you nothing here, and certainty bought on faith costs a great deal.
Three years is young, seven is interesting, and fifteen is a long storage, so check the arithmetic.