Sam T

I understand how mystery bundles work and they make sense when a dealer with a long-term reputation for great business has some for sale. But you're talking about you buying a grab bag from a social media account. You can't know this person. You can't know their reputation. You can't possibly audit their randomization process. There was never any chance of you being able to verify the sellers claims. And they know it. Their business model was designed to completely sidestep any oversight or personal responsibility. They don't need to maintain any kind of reputation. And even if you could prove they were running scammy grab bags the only thing WhatNot will do is ban the account. They can just generate a new account with slightly different info. I kinda think we need to be honest about the difference between online and real-world sales. Mystery bags make a lotta sense as a product at an LCS or con, but online they're a perfect product for a scammer. I think maybe we should have an issue with 'em.

There's a comic book artist pitching for the Yankees?

You came to a comic forum on the internet to make a blind complaint about a local business that doesn't actually have anything to do with comics. Wouldn't that mean this is just off-topic spam?

This auction house sounds real sketchy and you really should raise awareness but it's kinda weird to go on make an elaborate complaint without any attribution. You're a comic collector on a forum for other comic collectors and you know the name of auction house that you believe to be behaving unethical but you're not sharing it's name with the community. Without the name of the auction house, this kind of complaint ends up feeling like copypasta.

FANTASTIC FOUR #41 2.5/3.0 $10

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #51 2.0 $15

King Kai is makin' him chase a monkey @ 10x gravity and he's never been happier.

In 30 years of reading Spider-Man comics I can say that I have never read a "memorable" Madame Web story. She never really felt like a "character". She was a vague plot device. Pure deus-ex-machina. When the writers messed up real bad and needed Parker to get a bunch of exposition, they threw Madame Web into the story to read the note from editorial. But by doing that, they also destroyed any sense of real stakes in the story.

I'm wondering if any of the usual comic dealers are gonna be at this show in Queens next week. Their guest list is kinda weak and there's no list of vendors. I don't wanna waste a day if no one's showing up 🤣 https://cosmicconny.com/

You two absolutely nailed it. I've been posting this link a lot: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/blackstone These are all the fines paid by CGC's new parent company and all of their subsidiaries. Once a company is bought out by Blackstone they tend to commit...crimes? I'm honestly not sure if crime is the legally appropriate word but luckily, I'm not a lawyer and it's definitely a morally appropriate use of the word. Blackstone has been fined for lying to investors, ripping off their own employees and destroying the environment. Of course these guys were going to bust out CGC in a glorious blaze of fraud...it's kinda the only thing Blackstone can do. They cannot generate products, improve a companies reputation or innovate in any way. Blackstone's job is to pile on overhead in the shape of marketing and nepotistic hires and then cuts costs around the product to make up for the budgetary shortfall. Then when the cost cutting destroys the product they sell the asset at a loss and claim those losses against gains on the profits form the companies that haven't been completely busted yet. CGC's going the way of Ramsey's Sports. . I don't think this is gonna end well for Matt "Scatino" Nelson.

This is so obvious and insightful that I kinda feel stupid for not saying this! The lawsuit as described by a guy on twitter (I still haven't been able to find the full text of the complaint) is very clearly describing a criminal act. The idea of filing a lawsuit BEFORE working with law enforcement to have criminal charges filed is just backwards. Generally the stat has more resources and a higher success rate w/ criminal charges than plaintiffs in civil suits. Also, CGC wouldn't be paying for the investigative resources so it would literally save them money while also solving the problem of these two folks. Going civil before criminal is a very sketchy move...through...his...teeth 🤣

There might be two cases but to the average collector there's still only 1 problem. We simply cannot trust a slab to be the same book on the label. That's it. The massive portion of the community was suggesting that CGC had a fraudster in the company from the very first day that SwapGate was talked about. CGC made statements declaring that the problem was a single crooked dealer and there was no inside man. The "two separate issues" narrative is only true from CGC's perspective after they told the community there was no inside man. Now that statement doesn't really seem intellectually defendable. Matt Nelson lied to the comics community.

Come on...it's 100% impossible to get meaningful information out of a 20 page thread. Most of the replies don't even contain a complete thought. Even if there's real information in there, it's surrounded by spam. Please copy and paste any information you think is applicable here and I'll check it out but trying to get me to read a whole bunch of nonsense because it MIGHT contain information doesn't really seem reasonable.

This should be everyone's biggest fear. This whole thing kinda feels like an example of "loss harvesting". Blackstone over pays for this asset, then they tank the value with a negative-engagment marketing campaign and get to claim massive losses against any profits they have from their other businesses. I think CGC is actually more valuable to Blackstone if it's broken and that's very VERY bad for people who think their slabs will be valuable in the long run.

People were noticing a lot of books online with labels that didn't match and then the community said either they're cracking open and resealing slabs or there's an inside man. CGC's statements on the issue are the only thing separating these cases from each other. The community here is talking about a single issue: Can we trust the label on a slab when we buy it from a 3rd party or not. Matt Nelson is trying to turn one very large problem in a bunch of smaller problems that the company can sweep under the rug.

Only according to CGC. When people started finding the first incontrovertible evidence of reholdering, they immediately started saying that this problem is much bigger than a single dealer and that an inside man was likely to be involved. CGC then went on a media blitz trying to frame the entire issue around a single bad dealer. CGC wants these to be separate issues but in reality there's only one problem: The community can't really trust that CGC'd book bought from a stranger is the same book as the label. The community does not see each individual scammer as a separate issue. The credibility of CGC's slabs is the only problem that CGC is facing. I mean it's a very simply issue here. Removing and creating false context doesn't really change anything. Matt Nelson went out of his way to convince the community that CGC employees were not fraudulently reholdering. Two weeks later his company is saying that employees have been committing fraud all along. That can't really be defended. I think Nelson might get the book behind his poor media literacy. Lying on the internet when court documents say otherwise is just corny and weird.

It seems like if CGC was ready to file a lawsuit this week, that they must have already been investigating these folks 2 weeks ago when Matt Nelson gave that interview with 9.9 and Davengers. It seems like the only two possibilities: 1. Matt Nelson was deliberately misleading the community 2. Matt Nelson has no idea what his company is actually doing. Both seem to be really really bad for CGC going forward. Their product ain't a bunch of plastic cases. CGC's product is their reputation. Did Matt Nelson just torch the companies reputation?

This is pretty weird. I'm wondering how the registry actually handles reholdering. Right now it's "Grade Date" is listed as 2006 but the label is the newer style that wasn't used until 2016. Does sending a book to CGC for reholdering in a new label usually trigger a change in the "Grade Date" in the registry?

No, I am not assuming that at all but you keep implying that CGC's reholdering employees were incompetent instead of acknowledging much more likely scenario: slabs aren't tamper proof. There really aren't that many different possible explanations. Really just two. One explanation was a scammer inside CGC's reholdering process, the other explanation was that slabs are being counterfeited well enough to get past CGC's own employees. Matt Nelson said it isn't the first option...that only leaves option #2. Slabs are not tamper proof.

Except this isn't the issue. The real issue isn't about CGC employees detecting resealed slabs. The real issue is that if folks can get them buy CGC employees then they can definitely get them by most collectors. And if CGC's slabs can't be trusted from 3rd party sellers, then their service is worth a lot less than it was. The value of CGC's grading services is directly correlated to communities belief that the slabs are tamper-proof. The community no longer believes that. That's meaningful and it's a much bigger problem than CGC's reholdering process. It's a much bigger problem than one scammer on eBay. Slabs aren't tamper-proof and that's the bigger problem.

The only new piece of information that Matt Nelson shared in that interview was confirmation that it was not an inside job and that no CGC employees were implicated. He confirmed that the real issue was the security of the slabs and that someone was able to get swapped books by CGC's own employees...that's the ball game folks 🤣🤣🤣 Saying that collectors should be able to spot fakes while CGC's own employees couldn't do it is just not plausible. Matt Nelson's interview is actually worse for CGC than the conspiracy theory he quashed. Firing a rogue employee is an easy way to reduce liability, but he confirmed that the slabs are not secure while CGC continues to sell 'em. Yikes!

I'm sorry but this a pretty unreasonable thing to say. The folks at CGC doing reholdering crack more slabs than anyone else in the world and they were fooled. It's just not reasonable to pretend that a comic buyer could spot something that CGC's own professionals could not spot. And the idea that we still don't know what happened is just not true. There were basically two possible problems we could be seeing: 1. An inside man at CGC swapping books during the reholdering. 2. Slabs are not tamper proof and popular online retailers have figured out how to crack,swap and reseal slabs. Well Matt Nelson, President of CGC, just confirmed in an interview that there was no inside man or rogue CGC employee involved in this scam. That's actually WORSE for CGC. A bad employee could be fired but if slabs themselves are insecure then it means that their core product is no longer viable and that's a death sentence for a business.

CGC's core product was designed reduce friction in comic sales. It's value comes from allowing strangers to buy and sell comics form each other with a meaningful guarantee that the books were exactly as described. After swapgate showed people how easy it is to open and reseal slabs, a slabs guarantee is only as good as the reputations of all the people that have had access to that book. If I have to research and backtrack the entire chain of custody of a comic book and trust everyone in that chain, then I don't see what value CGC is actually adding. I've been going to conventions in NYC for over decade, buying from the same small group of local dealers the whole time. These guys know how to grade. They know how to spot resto. And if they get something wrong, they'll make it right. I can get a raw book from any of these guys for less money and actually KNOW that a trustworthy human has graded it and is willing to put their personal reputation behind the sale. Most collectors who stick with it long term will build these kinds of relationships and right now CGC has nothing to offer these kinds of buyers and sellers. The value of slabbing a book is only as good as the piece of mind provided by the security features of the case and that piece of mind no longer exists for active and experienced collectibles. And in terms of liability, to commit meaingufl resources to a redesign would involve admitting the security flaws of the product they were currently sellings. CGC would basically have to stop taking submissions while they figured out the next design or risk massive liability for continuing to sell flawed and misleading products.

Anyone taking bets on which investigative service they're using? My money is on K2 (Kroll). Black Cube has too much baggage and Pinkerton has too much overhead.

Those two websites look nothing alike and the "real one" doesn't even have any online inventory. What situation? You posted a link to a generic comic store with fake listings and then you posted a link to generic comic book store with no listings. Why would anyone be getting paid from any of this?