It is true that there are now and have been in the past VHS sellers operating on Ebay, as well as other on-line venues, who do make illegal bootleg copies of movies and pass them off, often at premium prices, as legitimate tapes, but it is unfair and untrue to state that more than half of VHS sellers operate this way. By and large the sellers are honest, and the few who are not are eventually caught up with through the feedback system, square deal trading and other programs Ebay has in operation and are suspended from trading on the site. The real tell on identifying sellers dealing in bootleg tapes is a seller with expensive, hard to find titles who also have low feedback numbers and negative comments left by unsatisfied buyers.
              Copyright infringement is a crime punished severely by Federal Law and investigated by the FBI, and it’s really easy for them to do. When a seller comes under suspicion of making bootlegs, all an agent has to do is buy a suspected tape from them. If it is indeed an illegal copy and the seller is making a regular practice of it, they or their fellow agents will buy enough of these fakes to make the case a serious matter, and then they will make life extremely unpleasant for the bootlegger.    
              I have been involved in VHS since the 80’s when independent video rental stores boomed, first as a video store operator and now as a dealer in used tapes, and if you understand the way the business developed over the years you will know why many of the tapes offered for sale are in the condition they are in.
            These days, most of the independent video retailers have closed down, being  replaced by a few huge chain store operations, like Blockbuster & Family.  However the store inventories from the Mom & Pop operations are still around and a good percentage of these tapes find their way to Ebay. It used to be a common practice in the independents for a store manager to take a VHS tape box, cut it into sections, usually the front and back cover and one side, and place the pieces in a hard plastic storage box. This was done to eliminate the need for a clerk to use a tag system to locate tapes, the customer would just select their movies and take them to the counter to check them out. It saved time and effort, but it is also why you see a lot of older tapes, which are also often the more expensive tapes, in boxes that are sometimes referred to as rental boxes, showbox, or hardcase.
       These days I acquire the tapes I sell from several sources, a lot of them come from public auctions where tapes from private estates are regularly offered for sale. These previously owned tapes come from everywhere you can imagine, are in all states of condition from excellent to exceptable, and many of them no longer have the boxes with them, having been lost or discarded by previous owners.  
       Another source that I recently started to use is a local warehouse distributor that specializes in volume. A few weeks ago is a good example. For 450.00 I bought a pallet of VHS tapes containing 1000+ tapes, which had come out of a Blockbuster Video store. In this lot there where only 22 different titles, the lot consisting of between 30 and 70 issues of the same movie, and about a third of these where without box covers, the store clerks  thrown them away. Currently  all Blockbuster stores, as well as many if not all of their competitors,  stocks 100+ titles of every popular tape that is released to video. When the interest of their customers in these tapes wane they have do something with the huge numbers they have on hand, and many wind up in the possession of Ebay sellers like myself, and account for most of the large numbers of multiple titles offered for sale.
        My favorite source for acquiring the expensive and harder to find tapes, other than randomly coming across them at auctions and flea markets, is to use Ebay itself. I often look for sellers who have under priced expensive tapes, which are exactly the type to be most concerned about with in regard to copyright violation, and if I see something that I feel is priced 10.00 or more to cheaply, I buy it and resell it, placing it in my Ebay store it usually sells in a few months time. Over the last 4 years I have done this 100’s of times and have received a total of 3 bootlegged tapes. Naturally I was less than pleased when I did receive these fakes, but it has been well below 1 percent and I don’t feel that it has been a bad average at all.
         I have found the best thing to do is to read and pay attention to what the seller has to say about their items. The very greatest number of sellers are honest merchants only interested in earning a legitimist profit from their efforts and don‘t lie about what they are offering for sale.