paqart

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigates criminal counterfeiting, piracy, and other federal crimes. You can report suspicions concerning the manufacture or sale of counterfeit or pirated goods to the FBI by contacting your local FBI Office, or or calling (202) 324-3000 and asking to speak with the Duty Complaint Agent. If you suspect products for sale on the Internet are counterfeit or pirated, you can report your suspicions to the FBI Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

born in 1992

A couple examples: https://www.kptv.com/2023/09/29/thieves-steal-priceless-books-comics-portland-collector-days-after-his-death/ https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-texas-houston-embezzlement-theft-295d1f2b7516415fb1e075e4e814b944

The FBI deals with counterfeiting, forgery, and high end collectibles/art-related crimes. This ticks all the boxes. The only reason they wouldn't look at this is if they are too busy doing other things.

He said the only insurance they'd have, and they might have it, is "Stop Loss". Meaning, if they anticipate $100M annual losses due to fraud, eBay covers it out of pocket. Anything over that, the insurance company deals with.

@Buzzetta: I just spoke with a good friend who is an expert on the insurance industry and who is familiar with the ways they deal with fraud. He said the most likely scenario is that eBay pays the buyer out of pocket, without making an insurance claim. They wouldn't let anyone else know what they did, and wouldn't look for more victims. They would only deal with buyers who came to them. If the size of the fraud was large enough, they might use stop loss insurance, but the total value of this one individual's fraud is probably too low to do that. Even if it hit a million dollars, it would be easier to eat the cost. About the only way he could see eBay doing anything else is if they wanted to make an example of the scammer. This, he said, is not impossible. If that is what they decided to do, they would throw everything into going after the scammer and CGC. The goal would be to scare everyone involved so badly that they "voluntarily" clean up their act. If, in the unlikely event eBay did make an insurance claim, the insurance company would be in a position to go after CGC, and likely would. He said the insurance company "would absolutely go after CGC first" and ignore the scammer, because that is where they are more likely to get paid. Then, as I thought, CGC would have to go after the scammer. In other words, my scenario only happens if eBay does something that my insurance agency friend thinks is highly unlikely: make a claim on the insurance. This has nothing to do with the business relationship between CGC and eBay. Instead, it is based on the value of the items involved, fraud volume, and gross sales. After saying all that, he thinks CGC is "screwed." Their reputation is their product, and their product is this slab, which has clearly been compromised. Worse, they have slabs for other high value collectibles, like coins and stamps. What happened with comics does spillover reputational damage that would impact their stock value if they are a public company.

My quick answer: I prefer newsstands to directs because they remind me of buying comics off a spinner rack as a kid. That nostalgia is a feeling I like. Simple as that. For the same reason, I prefer comics with a newsstand date stamp on the cover. I prefer MJI comics to those without, because they were overseas with soldiers in sometimes very harsh conditions and somehow made there way back intact. I respect our soldiers, and these comics are just a way to remind me of that. It also affects the reading experience, because reading them puts me, at least mentally, in the shoes of a soldier sitting outside the PX reading a comic before he has to peel potatoes, fly a jet, do a drill, or something else. I prefer UK and Canadian variants because they are newsstands, but rarer than US newsstands, which makes them harder to track down. Finding them is like a treasure hunt.

Good point. For me, I think any GA book in 6.5 or better looks good, then SA in 7.0 or better, Bronze in 8.0 or better, then 9.0 and up for copper to modern. I have a few 9.8's, but need two pairs of glasses to see the blemishes. For that reason, I tend to get 9.2-9.6 instead, unless the price is right on a 9.8.

EBay isn't liable for anything beyond a refund to the buyer because of their guaranty. That guaranty doesn't assign or admit fault, nor should it. As far as I can tell, eBay hasn't done anything wrong. However, they could be left holding the bag for damages. I have received a refund like that before, but think it was extracted from the seller through eBay. Something along the lines of, "you can voluntarily refund the buyer's money, or we'll do it and withhold the same amount plus a fee from your other sales." I have a hard time believing eBay has a fund for refunds. It makes more sense they use insurance. If that is true, eBay's opinion is irrelevant. Insurance companies make money by paying off claims, then recovering the damages from whomever they can identify in the chain of responsibility. In this case, we're looking at around $100k or more in known damages, so it is worth the trouble to run this down.

Pardon me for butting in, but in this case, it doesn't matter if the scammer bought it for himself. By offering it for public sale, he created the hazard of financial injury to someone else. That, I think, is a crime on its own. For instance, something you see in the world of fine art sometimes, is the withdrawal of paintings from auctions prior to the auction because the painting is discovered to be fake. If they don't discover the fake, the auction proceeds, and the seller knows it is fake, though bids as a shill, he is creating the possibility of a genuine sale to someone else.

This has nothing to do with suing eBay for anything. EBay guarantees sales. If a customer demands a refund due to fraud, and eBay or eBay's insurance company has to pay for it, they are now the victim. If it's an insurance company, then the insurance company will go after CGC for the money no matter what eBay wants. If eBay paid out of pocket, they could let it go, but that doesn't change the fact they have a legitimate cause of action.

I'm missing something here. How does the $4,995 sale for the MJI/9.8 version happen before the $1,450 sale for the 9.2/MJI? I'm picturing something like this: Step 1 or 2) Buy "SLAB" (this is the 9.8 slab, with comic) Step 1 or 2) Buy "INFERIOR" (this is the low grade comic) Step 3) Swap INFERIOR into SLAB, making "FAKE" Step 4) Get FAKE graded (must have latest graded date) Step 5) Sell FAKE (must have latest sale date) So how is the ASM INFERIOR graded and sold after the FAKE?

I wonder. Googling the name doesn't show any connection to comics. How many active buyers and sellers of comics cannot somehow be linked to comics on social media?

I sent in almost all the comics raw, as you suggested. The 28 or so that I bought as slabs are either comics without coupons (like modern DCs) or aren't valuable enough to be interesting to our bad guy. I don't like to spend more than $200 for a comic, and when I do, don't go much above that. The only comics I own that are high value and are within (barely) the targeted price range are modern newsstands that I bought cheap and had slabbed myself.

Not me. I only own a little over 100 slabs, and they aren't susceptible to this problem. None are in our guy's target value range, most couldn't have MJ inserts, and those that could, aren't labelled that way. If they have them, it's a freebie. I do have some MJI comics, not a lot, but all are raw.

"High value" in this case is $3.5k-$20k. Have we seen any examples outside this value range? This may be the seller's financial limit, because he can't buy the more expensive comics. More likely, the higher value comics don't exist in the volume he relies on to mask his nefarious activities.

Very true. There are quite a few people around the US with my name as well. One actually lived in the same city I did, registered to attend the same school as me (which bumped my registration out because they thought we were the same person). Another has a doctorate, though from a different school, and one is a multimillionaire in Canada. One, that a friend loves to send me clippings about, is a career petty criminal. Whenever he steals a car or gets locked up in Oregon, I find out about it. Anyway, it could be totally made up also. We've seen about four user names so far, and none are similar to each other. In my case, when I make user names, I almost always include the characters "PAQ", but not everyone does that.

I still think "briva3" is a clue to the guy's name. My guess is that it is something like "B. RivaXXXXX". So, we're talking a Ben, Brian, Byron, Bob, etc., plus a last name that either is "Riva" or starts with "Riva".

Now that you mention it, you're right. In my original collection from the 1970's, my Avengers #1 had tape, and I had at least 5-8 Golden Age comics (early Superman/Action/WF) that had color added (added badly). I don't remember the comic any more, but can still see this 3/4" long brushstroke of non-matching purple paint on a cover. Back then, if a comic was graded "good" or less, that kind of thing was almost expected.

Ignore my previous post. Of course the higher grade slab comes first, it has to. Then, it's comic is removed and replaced by another comic that may have been graded later. The reholder retains original grade date, though it is made much later.

Here's another stumper: If we are agreed that cert #'s and are the same comic (IH 181), then the lower graded comic with missing value stamp was graded after the other one. Grade dates: 6/2/2023 (grade 9.0, Universal) 7/25/2023 (grade 8.5, Universal) Based on this, CGC corrected the bad grade (9.0) with a qualified grade (8.5) but gave it a new number at the same time.

I got the dates mixed up. Thought the IH181 + MS5 sale was 2 days before the IH181 got graded. This happens when the posts are split up as they are. Hard for old fogey like me to keep track of them.

HTH did he get it graded two days after the sale? How did he get it from the seller 2 days after the sale?

I agree. I'm looking at $100k tied up ea/ year as a minimal amount. I don't see how it could be much less. I do see it could be much higher. I'm curious if he could pull off similar scams with cards and coins. I think he can, though with coins, think it would be harder to do because coin collectors (I assume) are more capable of distinguishing grade differences than comics or cards because the type of flaws associated with lower grades are more limited than the variety found in paper collectibles.

My potentially totally wrong guess: The bad guy is scamming comics, cards, and coins The bad guy owns equipment needed to seal slabs of various sizes, at the least The bad guy is doing this fraud as a business. Meaning, it isn't a side scam. It's all he does. His minimal annual investment is $100k. Meaning, that is his cost of doing "business." To be profitable, he has to churn $200k in sales every year. The comics we've seen so far are in the $5k-$15k value range. Average to $10k each. He's doing 20+ comics a year He does not sell the raw 9.8's he needs to get slabs, or not often. This is a fixed cost that is not recouped, but rolled over for more fraud. The bad guy has a stable of targeted issues he deals in, and not much else The bad guy cannot afford to have his cash flow compromised by slow TATS. Therefore, he has multiple 9.8's of the same issues in his stable, so that he has multiple submissions in the queue at all times. The bad guy has designed his scam so that he receive new fraudulently encapsulated comics every 30-60 days. If not, he goes broke.