Stefan_W

I am sure it happens with them too. When I do crack and resubs I use a can opener to open up slabs from the other guys, and a lot of times their cases open up without damaging them much (unlike CGC cases). I suspect it would be easier although as you point out it is likely to be less lucrative. Having to wait a year or more for the swapped out slab to come back is probably the biggest deterrent from that end of the market.

It goes beyond this. If CGC is re-grading all of the reholders it would involve opening up the inner sleeve, which takes time, and having graders assigned to those books. This would increase the wait times for regular grading and increase the cost of reholdering.

My best guess is we will get a public statement once a solution and way forward is found. At least that is how I would handle it if I was running the show. Until then I am sure it is like a hornet's nest in those offices as people do their best to figure out what happened and how. Putting on the "if I was running the show" boots again, I would begin with checking the records to see if there was repetition in who was doing the re-slab if only to rule out internal stuff, and then go outwards from there.

Why? It is fraud which is a criminal offence.

They can fix the issue by putting the label in the same inner sheath as the comic like you see in some designs. The trouble is that this will not work with their current outer slab design so they would have re-work it all.

Looking at this completely objectively (or as objectively as I can) it is really tough to prove that shill bidding is happening. They are all MJ insert books so that 316 feedback bidder may just be a collector who struck out three times on big MJ grails. Dont get me wrong, I definitely believe what you are saying is true. I am just pointing out that I am about 80% sure of the shill bidding rather than 99%+ sure something funky is going on like with the other parts of this story.

Unfortunately, nothing really prevents scammers from setting up new accounts on Ebay and lather/rinse/repeat. I have seen the same scams under multiple accounts there many times. He could also move books to different forums or even auction houses and trickle them through a book or two at a time while flying under the radar. I am pretty sure that the only thing that would prevent it entirely would be to have the criminal justice system involved and sniffing around him.

As others have pointed out, it could be shady since it is possible the item was bid up by a shill in order to push you to your max amount. On the other hand it may have been completely legit. There is no way to know either way. I am inherently distrustful with stuff like this so I always decline second chance offers until I am able to get the book at a steal of a price that I cant say no to.

Holy poopah, these run for $67.50 for a pack of 50 in Canada. I think I will stick with the ones I am currently using and get for a small fraction of that price.

I cant see mine either. This happens from time to time and is no biggy - will probably be back up in an hour or two.

Update - My F5 key is almost completely worn out from constantly hitting it as I check for movement to the next stage.

Pressing will not remove finger prints but it can definitely remove finger bends.

This is the most helpful change CGC has made in a long time. I use these photos all of the time especially when buying. Turning to the topic of this thread, these photos should help to prevent a lot of shenanigans down the road - although, of course, you cant force people to refer to them.

This comes up with books that have Tatooz. It seems like it would be easy but issues come up when the staples are not identical in width and if the placement of the staples is slightly different from book to book. Either of these things means you would essentially be punching in new holes.

I press and submit my own comics, and yes I do press almost every book I send in. The exception would be new books off of the stand (rare for me to submit these) and older books with card stock covers that look like they are perfect already.

No matter what changes are made to a process the scammers out there are always there trying to find a work-around to beat the system. That is just what dishonest people do. I have no idea what happened, but my best guess would be a scammer figured out a way to crack and re-seal the case in order to swap out books. The good news for honest buyers is there is already a saying in our community about buying the book in the holder and not the number at the top. If the grading seems to be too soft to be true it probably is.

24 book modern submission: Shipped out from Canada - Nov 23 Arrived at CGC - Nov 28 Box opened and SFG - Dec 1 Credit card charged - Dec 13

This is exactly right. I remember being in the local comic shop in the 1980s and hearing guys talking about trimming openly, and one guy in a suit offering to trim up books for people for a small fee. My friends and I came upon the strategy of stacking heavy books on a comic for a week or two in order to flatten it out more. There was zero profit motive on our end since there was no profit to be had - we just wanted our books to look nicer. Some innovators who were older and more dedicated to figuring out other processes like using presses and steam. I dont think it is a stretch to say pressing comics already existed but came to the forefront when CGC started up and slabs became a thing. The corollary to that is CGC ruled early on that pressing was not a restoration in comics (unlike paper money). With pressing and slabbing being a legit thing it follows that people like me will look at some books that are already slabbed and say "I think I can get that out and maybe get a grade bump."

I was hoping to get my Modern submission back by Christmas but I am doubtful that will happen now. No biggy for me because I am no huge rush to get them back.

To build briefly on this point, some people roll books in auctions without adding tons of extra cash. I have heard of people who wanted a Promise Collection book and just sent in a bunch of other books to Heritage for auction to offset the cost. In terms of raw value those individuals may have done even worse given the exorbitant fees there, but if they did end up with the books they wanted they likely topped up with a bit of cash rather than putting large sums of cash on their card. I did that a lot on Comic Link during the pandemic. Even though I badly "overpaid" on just about everything I bought I put very little hard cash into it.

Is CL back to putting those dumb stickers on the backs of slabs again? I bought a few books that just arrived and they all have the stickers, and it looks like they were just put on.

They bought at the worst time to buy and are unloading at what is arguably the worst time to sell. Not really a recipe for solid investment results.

To each their own. People pay for whatever floats their boat, and in an auction format if two people want the same thing the price sometimes gets fugly. On that topic, I reject books with poor centering but dont care about white pages. Others have their own things.

People like what they like and will often pay a premium for that. If a person is wealthy a couple of thousand extra for a rare book may not mean too much. Those of us struggling with increases in the cost of groceries can just watch in awe.

I dont think it is possible to model the entire comic market. Models typically work under the larger principle of "garbage in - garbage out" and the reality is we do not have the majority of sales data. I think it is safe to assume that the majority of second hand comic sales overall are personal transactions that fly under the radar. If you look at comic value as the key output, and you make the assumption that public sales are the most important part of setting comic value, there is work that can possibly be done. It makes sense if you think that even in private sales people refer to public sales data to set value. The issue then becomes accessibility of data from public sites, and that is a pretty big stumbling block. It is possible to scrape Ebay and Heritage, for example, sites like Comic Link do no allow people to use the data in that way so even if you figured how to do it the output cannot be outwards facing. That severely restricts the usefulness of that data. I think this is an interesting discussion. The approach I would take is to segment the market into categories and deal with the associated problems with those segments individually in ways that make the most sense. The basic rationale is that someone who, for example, collects nothing but Silver Age books does not give a toss about how the modern market is behaving. The issue is that once things are split apart in this way for purposes of establishing trends it is almost impossible to put everything together in meaningful overall model - retrofitting in this way almost never works right.