comicwiz

Amazing! Control the narrative, stick head back in sand.

The sellers name kind of says it all, doesn't it? Is 92 the new code for rookie?

I don't want to get argumentative here, but I strongly beg to differ. This is more akin to an auto manufacturer discovering that the flex hose they equipped a fleet of vehicles malfunctions under certain pressure circumstances, that also disables the sensors on the brakes from funcitoning properly. Rather than issuing a voluntary recall, they put out some obscure form using an alpha-numeric code stating they will cover the repairs up to 15 years should an issue happen, not send a letter or notice to any of the car owners, and when something happens, they blame it on the driver for being negligent and not doing their part to check their brakes, drain and refill their brake fluid every six months. Such a thing actually exists. When have you ever heard a car manufacturer offer a warranty of any kind, for up to 15 years? Just try not to ask me how I know all this. When we are talking about a "supposed" self-appointed impartial third-party that has a made-up word in their name that functions as a euphanism for "warranty" or some type of guarantee, then you need to use the right comparison, and that needs to be on the level of a fundamental safety flaw that could cause a catastrophic event.

Don't look it at that way. Every little bit helps. I'm going to continue to do what I can, my situation depends on the timing of things aligning for me to do more, but there's still stuff in the works. Each discovery gets us closer to understanding what happenened here, and closer to the unsanitized truth. Don't expect that to come from CGC.

History has shown they won't. When the Ewart scandal broke, it became the community's responsibility to identify using before and after pics which comics Ewart had trimmed to receive higher grades on his submissions. I'd stood next to the two at a show and overheard them boast they were waiting on 600 submissions through their company (can't remember if it was called VIA) It was quite a long time ago, but even in that scenario, I don't think we found more than 40 books, maybe 50 tops, although I feel it was closer to 30. Keep also in mind that was one submission too that I overheard, who knows how many books he trimmed. We do what we can in these situations because it's expected no one else is willing to do it. CGC likely sees it as flinging mud on itself to produce this info. In situations like this, it becomes more about keeping up appearances, minimizing the damage, and avoiding as much as possible what's happening to companies like WATA, whose graded game market has bottomed out, and we haven't even seen bottom yet because the lawsuit against them is still pending.

That video ties in nicely with the continued efforts of boardies like @MasterChief, who also recently showed the losses on 290 Promise Collection books. In that video, Jobst does something very interesting, but more on this in a little bit. To your point on the need for an investigative journalist to cover this story, our beat, Jobst and Abramson were both relegated as "hacks" by people on these very boards. I saw right through those agendas, and as Jobst reveals examples of "record-breaking" WATA games that spearheaded that farcical market frenzy, with the exact same graded games reappearing in a slew of Nov auctions, nearly all showing astronomical losses, we know who was right with their concerns from go. On the point about what Jobst exposed, he demonstrates how HA used the exact same images from those "record-breaking" sales. The theory he advances is that the buyer just left them with Heritage for 2 years, in their vault, waiting for the right time to cash out. While I don't agree with this assessment, there is so much I could unpack about why I believe this part of the video is important. I just do not want to derail this thread. Suffice it to say, that the "underhandedness" being discussed is expemplified thoroughly by what went down with WATA, not only in relation to the people involved, their interconnections to comics, but the absolute sloppy, lame, weaksauce b.s. of trying to get away with something people were calling offside from every direction. And in comparison to the issues with Danny, we now have hecklers who assume that position to dispute or contest because of money. They see these expose's as interfering with making bank. How different is that really from someone who was deceiving on the scale of Dupcak? Isn't it still activity potentially advancing the proceeds through the crime of fraud by deception? Where are they now when that record-breaking sale of the WATA 9.8 Mario lost $1M on resale? What concievable reason will we hear that counters Jobst or Abramson, when the reality is they were both right. Dupcak was fairly knowledgeable, and knew how to gain acceptance even in private conversations. Unfortuantely, he was also someone that knew how to help himself with the knowledge/experiences he developed and utilized. Before robojo and methesulah, he was a participant in a number of important topics, and CGC decided not to even try the "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" strategy in their decision to ban him. I think we are worse off now than we were back then, because every time another large scale scandal emerges, it could potentially become a source of information for the next copycat and/or bad actor to refine, and take it further.

There's a follow-up to the WATA story which ties into a number of points being made in your post. I'm going to post another reply on my computer to not crowd this reply which includes the video embed:

NGC, the coin grading arm, under the umbrella of CCG (Acquired by Blackstone), has had it's slab counterfeited since 2008 IIRC. And counterfeits continue to be found, not just for NGC either. To have expanded those counterfeits to cross-over into comics would only need an incentive. We're seeing plenty of it (and I mean, the monetary gain of swaps) with this one seller alone. NGC had a coin tampering case that is starting to resemble what is happening here.

The other possibility - and we'd need some good exhaustive searching for this - but I learned recently about the slab used by AFA for coins being available through a source. That particular channel of submissions for the company may be on a smaller scale in comparison to other submissions, and thus it might not matter. But it would be interesting to see if "cracked" open cases are being put back in play, or whether a fabricator has developed an acrylic/hard plastic reproduction of the outer holder. We should also not overlook the possibility that if this many reholders are being put in play by a person with the fact patterns we are discovering, that a cracked tamper evident case could be used to force an unwarranted discount on the seller in receipt of the item when it's purchased. This is an angle I've seen with other scams, where bad actors are refining and evolving their tactics with a safety net or offset strategy of blaming the sender, or even possibly the grader, for damage, taking money to cover the cost, then using that to fund their shenanigans.

That might be a question for @agamoto, as there was a lot of info listed along with different occurrences, so it's possible some info didn't get reflected correclty in the summarizing post I did.

@sledgehammer stated the possibility the reholder on the 9.8 maintained the original grade date, confusing the chronology. I'm keeping my mind open on potential tampering being involved in the mix, as well as some space for spiked eggnog and cocktails to give the head spinning more familiar company.

Not directed at anyone, to make anyone feel little, or wrong or incorrect. Just a general statement based on my experiences with reporting transgressions in the past. feeBay doesn't care. CGC might because of the optics, but there's a likelihood this gets categorized as too stealth for them to procedurally detect reliably, or without frustrating/delaying their current modes of process. I hope I'm wrong, and they take this seriously. Remedies. I've tried (with mixed results) going the route of reporting fraud by deception through the Office of the Inspector General, and the FTC. I will need to better understand how this all shakes out, and I will say it is going to hurt our ability to get resources on something like this because we aren't the impacted victims here reporting this, although it's reasonable that we assert the position that it's happening in such a stealth manner that it's impossible for the consumer to even understand the nature of the deception, and the down-the-line impacts inevitably hurt us all, in terms of jeopardizing consumer confidence and the overall health of the hobby. After I've had a run through of what I hope to do in the coming week, I'm hoping to check back here to see what's developed. However it likely will need to be repackaged for easier, more cogent anaylis by examiners, and I think it will only help if we continue to make more finds, because the scale of this will always be looked at from the monetary damage component to justify the use of any oversight agencies time and resources. What I'm seeing as the benefit of going in this direction is to put pressure on all involved to recognize the severity of this, and at the very least to hopefully enforce corrective remedies like taking these slabs out of circulation.

My only follow-up to the last point is I think we need to keep an open mind that this seller may be using a full menu of options to carry out the deception, so while a "reholdering scam" is what it's being currently called, I feel like we are going to find situations where we can't exclude the possibility of tampering. my2cents

Reholder kept same cert date.

With each new discovery, it sure is starting to look like tampering.

The cert conventions used by CGC are above my pay grade, although I feel like we might be able to learn a thing or two by examining patterns. Good call, as I just noticed that myself.

Combined with rampant bid retractions, you now have the perfect storm for driving prices up, setting record sales, and not being on the hook for a cent of it, as long as you have a method of swapping books, changing certs, and listing that item under the guise of a completely different account, or in this case, a shiny new label and holder. Nice, safer hobby, thanks to a TPG asleep behind the wheel, and feeBay, whose execs are too busy to stalk, terrorize and threaten people who criticize their site.

Nice job @agamoto! I juxtaposed the two for better comparison, and include the cert data as well as sales dates: 9.2 - 4134002001 was graded on 1/24/2023 and sold on eBay July 1, 2023 for $1450 (Newsstand, MJ insert) 9.8 - 4152956002 was graded 11/09/2022 and sold on eBay Dec 16 2022 $4995 (Newsstand, MJ insert) 9.2 Certification number: 9.8 Certification number:

I know it was mentioned before in this thread (I think @Buzzetta posted about the feature being taken away, another nod to how fantastic feeBay has become to help enable deception and fraud) but if anyone knows a way to look-up any past account names or aliases, please post and tag me. Best to all for the holiday season!

One thing I'd like to share with everyone. Aliases are horrible ways to make connections to real people. The concern here is we veer off-course and this thread goes poof. Let's slay this without the thread going poof.

I don't even know why his videos are still being posted here.

I've just saved the image, I'll need to circle back to this in due time. I had a break the last two days which is something not always afforded to me, but I will come back to some of these that have been shared. I do Appreciate the reminder. I have something in the works as well that could mean circling back to some of these posts which haven't yet been matched up, so there's been some stuff going on in the background on this for sure. All that effort will go to trying to pin down more examples, which I'm going to do my best to look through during those few days between Christmas and New Years.

That is a good point to raise, because I want to clarify what I mean by posts where I mentioned insider and partial insider. I'm referring to instances where people within CGC were taken advantage of. When the Ewart scandal broke, there were people on both sides - imagine that dealers were defending him after we were showing clear as day before and after pics, that we knew were his books. And the photos of CGC dinners, where CGC folks were shown to be standing next to the pepetrations of the micro-trimming scandal. Sure there were people saying it was preferential treatment to high volume submitters, and there are multiple examples I can think of right now that I'm apprehensive to share that further reinforce this point, which would apply to what you describe as info that can be mined by the unscrupulous types, but suffice it to say that in many of these instances, the loyalties, friendships, and relations found some way to blur that line enough where one of the participants acted on greed, and I'm certain in doing this, there was a sense of betrayal and trust to the party(s) working at CGC. This could be one of those cases, or it might not be. Unfortunately, I've been at this long enough where I should have a better handle on judging people, but I still run into the occassional misjudgement of recognizing the difference between someone wanting help, and someone wanting to help themselves, which links back to the abuse of trust conundrum. This isn't an indictment of any company, entity or person, it's just one of the bleak downsides of sometimes trusting the wrong people.

It's not even anywhere at the level we are seeing with just this one, single instance. And I will say this much, I'm probably not done finding more. Look at those numbers, it's being alleged one seller, taking books that more refined collectors would thumb their nose to, and turn them into high yield returns via deception and fraud. How in the world do you equate a raw book comparison, when being able to flip through and see page 10 has the MVS cut out, or a panel from pg 14 is missing, to not being able to even examine the book in a slab? Now multiply just this one instance with all the scams that have severely rocked this hobby - and you may have been around long enough - but when @MasterChief and a handful of others helped put together the list of books impacted by the micro-trimming scam, I hosted that list on my site. If you want to talk about shade, maybe we should some day do it over a drink, because I was the one getting DDOS attacks on my server for trying to share a list with the wider community, to HELP them stay on top of books that were allegedly trimmed by Ewart. I didn't expect that those "invested" in covering that entire scandal up, who you might consider the good guys, turn against one of their own. But then we began to make better sense of why, when some of these books began reappearing with new certification numbers, and pedigree designations being scrubbed. The money those ever-so-slight grade increments introduced into the fray is the reason raw to graded comparisons of then and now cannot be drawn fairly, no matter how many bogeymans you line-up in the old days. So for this reason, and a plethora of others, which include not derailing this thread, I agree to disagree.

That to me has always been the much bigger talking point. This community has been doing this for the entire time I've been a member here. Many of them are long gone, a few of them are still doing their thing. I can't even begin to imagine what the hobby would have looked like without the hard work people have put into exposing bad operators. Many of you may not remember, but in the early days, CGC put so much emphasis on ridding bad actors like Danny Dupchak. This hobby bogeyman narrative spilled over into a number of different things as the company evolved, and the recurring theme was to make P2P trading of comics safer. I've said this before, but all grading did was multiply the problem, and the field of bad operators went from a very small handful, to swarms and packs who continue to exploit every opportunity the slab product poses to eliminate raw, in-hand inspection of a comic. This is just one of many. There is no pay, no gratitude from CGC because this ultimately causes a bad optics situation for them, and while the wider community can sometimes frustrate these endeavours, especially when you have YouTubers lifting other people's work to flex for likes, all I can say is what you've contributed in this thread has been very helpful, is needed, and I thank-you for it.