wiparker824

ComicLink posted that they were doing just that. Not sure which books they had crossed off but they did say their proof was they have a record the person bought it from them, then reholdered it, then resold it thru them and the book is identical in images they have from the before and after reholder. But it is a really weird look to put out a list asking for people to send the books in and the next day start crossing them off.

interesting that they crossed off one of the big Spidey yellow label books but the other remains.

Seems likely, there doesn’t appear to have been any record of it being sold. It was signed in AZ at one of Stan’s last signings before he passed. And AZ is one of the known locations of the scammer. I’m guessing they had it signed for PC and wanted the custom label that came out later so they sent in for reholder/custom label. There’s really no monetary benefit to just get a custom label which is all that appears different in this particular case.

Well that process will only happen if they’ve determined it wasn’t fraudulent and retaining its grade. In which case you have no “evidence” that would matter unless like I said you believe CGC themselves will do something nefarious. If your book is actually evidence they said they will be contacting you so that they can review with more documentation. And even if they do that and at the end you decide to have them send the book back regraded and relabeled correctly you’re going to have a paper trail to link these 2 certs together if needed in the future. I don’t see a lot of risk of loss of anything sending these back in to CGC, but again if you or others do by all means you’re entitled to hold on to them.

I guess, to me it’s only a loss if you assume they won’t send it back or they will do something illegal. Otherwise you’re not losing anything. You will get it back. But there’s nothing compelling you to send it if it makes you feel better to hold onto it, just wouldn’t be too much of a worry for me.

How could possible know this with certainty unless you’ve been let in on their internal investigation which I’m sure included an investigation of the employees who handled the books and may still be ongoing?

Even if CGC regrades and reholders your book you’re still going to get your “evidence” back, they’re going to send it slabbed back to you. They’re not going to slip in a Hulk 181 with a MVS and destroy your evidence. If the fear is they would simply reslab the book without checking it, or check it and purposely still put it in with the wrong label well, you’d still get your evidence back if you want to crack it yourself when they send it to you. Even so, I think that’s a bit far fetched. If they did that and were caught it would spiral this entire thing to a much much worse place than it already is for them.

All depends on when you bought. If you bought at the pandemic peak you probably prefer the money if they are reimbursing at the price paid, buy another 9.8 for less money and keep the difference in cash. If you bought before the pandemic then, yeah, even if they reimburse the price paid that still sucks for that individual. I’m not sure how they plan to reimburse but the only way for them to avoid this problem entirely is if they agree to pay the purchase price if you have a proof of sale OR the current FMV, whichever is higher. In that case nobody would be screwed over. But I guess we will have to wait to see what they do.

This is indeed the real scam. I can’t even get notes on a 9.0 consistently this person is getting notes on 9.8’s???

Yeah I believe the one on the interior is most likely real or if forged it was done many years ago, but probably real just unwitnessed. The one on the back cover, if this book is fraudulent is likely the forged signature.

Yeah I see now that it was signed on the back cover. I didn’t previously see that, makes a lot more sense now that they forged the back cover signature.

Edit: Nvm, didn’t scroll to see the actual images with the signature on the back cover.

Yeah… keep in mind this same Reddit user posted a thread on that same sub titled “Why I stopped buying slabs (and why you should too)” and filled an essay of campaigning against slabs and CGC about 5 months ago and it got twice as many replies as what this new thread did. So, you have 1. A person who has previously hated CGC still hating CGC and 2. Getting less interaction with this post than his previous drivel. This isn’t to dismiss CGC’s failure in this debacle, just that that user on that sub isn’t a good barometer of anything. https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbookcollecting/s/5wp6pJ3hlM

I’ve already made some raw purchases in 2024… but I’ve not sent a dime to CGC this year …until they open the package I already sent them sitting on their warehouse floor.

I’m not entirely sure why it was ever a debate. They literally say that on the submission form: The problem of course is the last bit, they clearly were taking those that had been opened and were beyond a minor chip or crack. Also it’s not like people were unkowningly catching a regrade. These services (reholder vs grading) have and always have had entirely different TAT’s and most importantly prices for the fees. If you’re book was too damaged to qualify for a reholder you’d have been contacted by CGC, they didn’t just regrade it and not tell you. This of course does bring up one other nuance to our bad actor who pulled this off. Which is, even if the inspector for the reholder decided their slab was too banged up for a reholder, they’d have emailed them and asked them if they wanted to proceed with the regrade to which they’d have obviously said no to to avoid being found out.

I think you’re talking about what should have been happening, but as someone who submitted multiple reholders with things like a cracked corner of the slab and had no regrade, just straight reholder with the same cert number retained I can tell you the slab definitely didn’t need to be flawless to get a reholder without a regrade. Will it need to be going forward? I guess time will tell. It certainly could have been one way to have avoided this mess. There were some reholders that people would get rejected, and they’d have been sent to regrade, these would be cases where the case wasn’t even close to flawless. The case essentially completely shattered or shattered enough to where it was obvious the book could easily be taken in and out. The other way people hit regrades on reholder attempts was when the book looked like it had been damaged within the holder from whatever caused the case to be damaged in the first place.

You’re describing dealers. This is what they do… they happen to move a lot of books like IH181 and ASM300 because those are very common books that have a high enough price tag still to be worthwhile to flip. Dealers have bought and sold those two books in bunches since before CGC was even around. It’s much more suspicious if a dealer was flipping books with low census numbers every week… if you told me they just happened to have bunches of Action1’s listed on eBay every week, then yeah that would sound a bit suspicious.

Well said. And just to add it’s not just the risk of 66k in your example if you bungle it. It’s also the risk of being caught and prosecuted. I think a lot of people are skipping that part of this. Even if a YT video drops showing it can easily be done with 0 evidence of tampering (which hasn’t happened) it’s still not something many people want to risk legal consequences for. And I don’t think it’s a low risk either. If someone came to me with this plan they thought was a genius get rich scam I’d advise them not to because beyond being morally reprehensible they are likely going to get caught. I know when I spend that kind of money in a book I look at all the past sales of that cert, heritage, eBay, etc. I’ve never been looking for differences really but mainly for bidding history so I can see sort of the landscape of how it played out previously. I don’t think I’m alone in doing that sort of research on high dollar books. Others will do it, and eventually they’ll find you out. Especially in the day of CGC imaging everything.

I thought I was meticulous and generally good at self-grading… until I stumbled across his videos probably a decade ago now. Genuinely learned a lot from his YT. Don’t see channels like that anymore. Every channel is just MCU leaked so and so is playing the next villain in Doctor Strange 6, buy this random book now! now! now!

Probably didn’t help that we had a rather large section of pages talking about how we can get the FBI on her case. That wasn’t very welcoming of us. Drew Brees Larson Rivas if you’re out there lurking please join us we will hold on the FBI until we hear your take on “Are prices still climbing or have they eased up a bit???” What say you?

I don’t know that this is a skill problem, certainly hard to believe anyways. This is a process problem more than likely IMO. It seems that more than likely the books for reholders weren’t even looked at, likely not even removed from the inner wells. Because if they were it isn’t hard to flip thru and verify a MJI. That’s a “skill” I can teach my 4 year old - find the books with the jewelry ad. Because if you’re going to keep allowing for ME and reholder on books where the corner cracked and the book can be slid out then the process must be to look at the actual book. The issue of course is this process costs more time, which is ultimately money. In hindsight I’m sure the CGC execs would agree that it would have been a good investment, but in the moment it was likely a cost saving measure on a process rather than a skill issue.

I’m just picturing a bunch of Australians waking up to a newsfeed on their phone saying WTF is a reholder? Who is CGC? And then proceeding to stomp out some deadly creature that wondered into their home.

I don’t think 3 days is enough time for me to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. I need to find someone willing to trade slabs for antibiotics and bullets asap.

Still a drop in the bucket for CGC/Blackstone. Now if the scammer’s favorite was ‘Tec 27 they might have been in trouble.