JC25427N

On 1/4/2024 at 11:45 PM, shadroch said:

MCs will take any slab on consignment and pay you 90% of the sale price.

I can confirm, MCs give the best deals, but you have to find a good one. I used to give all of my slabs to MC Hammer to sell for me back in the day

On 1/3/2024 at 8:32 PM, COMICLINK said:

Hello Everybody,

This is what we are doing at ComicLink to protect the community. The objective is to inform those that have purchased the cert numbers in question in the past, and ensure that no future buyer on ComicLInk has to worry about buying any of the cert numbers in question unwittingly.

1) Deleting Exchange postings with these cert numbers (I believe this is done, we need to double check)

2) Reviewing any Auction listings with these cert numbers (there were only a few - sending out to CGC for review and will know this week). 

3) We have developed methods to ensure that there will be no auction listings or exchange postings with these cert numbers going forward, unless cleared by CGC.  No one should worry about bidding in the auction starting January 11th. This is already in "Beta".  None of these books will be in in the upcoming auction once it goes live unless cleared, or any other upcoming auctions.  We will inform any submitters of the issue.

4) I looked at some of the higher end books and found a bunch on the CGC list that are fine. I noticed we sold them multiple times and compared images, which match. 

These include the JIM 83 8.0 and 7.0 and some other Silver Age keys. 

I sent the list, with images to CGC as well for confirmation, received it, and they should be removed from the list.

5) Lastly, and this is the most time consuming, we will be finding all of our buyers that have ever purchased one of these cert numbers and we will reach out to them proactively to alert them to this situation pertaining to their book(s).   

We will get through this together

-Josh

You forgot to add "Which we didn't have to do...." 

On 1/2/2024 at 8:51 PM, thehumantorch said:

  Many of the books in my collection I've slabbed myself

Is your name Bree by any chance? 

On 12/29/2023 at 1:58 PM, THE_BEYONDER said:

How can CGC get annoyed with the customer for mistakes they themselves are making?

Because of their lack of understanding

On 12/28/2023 at 11:19 PM, paqart said:

I don't think you are right at all. there are multiple crimes here, interstate commerce, use of the mails, wire fraud, theft by deception, etc, multiplied by how many times it was done. This is a huge criminal case, not a small one. The scammer defrauded customers, but also created financial liability for CGC. CGC has already announced they will make customers whole, I assume by refunding their buy price for the comics. That would likely mean the comic is bought by CGC, so they will have a way to recover some of that money by reholdering and grading them. That isn't a guarantee however, and still represents a loss to CGC.

As I look at this, the scammer is 100% criminally liable for the scam. However, CGC *might* be looked at as partly responsible because their service is to certify and guarantee the authenticity of their holder's contents. However, they were defrauded also, so they might not be considered criminally liable, though they do bear civil liability because the guarantee they are paid for was no good in these cases. Therefore, it wasn't really a guarantee and one could argue the grading fees were elicited due to fraudulent representations. I don't think that is a good argument because the grading fees involved came from the scammer himself. The argument is that by allowing the scam through negligence on their part, the overall value of CGC's guarantee is reduced, thus affecting all customers.

I agree that might happen, but I don't see it as CGC's fault because they had no mens rea. Until notified of this breach, they had no reason to believe it was even possible. Bottom line, I think CGC is doing the right thing, the scammer goes to jail, and buyers of counterfeits will get their money back if they choose to take it. The opportunity loss will be borne by the buyers, for instance the person who posted about his 8.0/9.0 ASM 129. He paid less for the fake 9.0 than it is worth as the 8.0 it is. In his case, I wouldn't give it to CGC for the 9.0 buy price, but would keep it as an 8.0 or sell it. It's unfortunate he can't get the 9.0 price, but I don't see a reasonable argument that CGC would have to pay that, particularly since it would be a flexible estimate at best.

Did you rent those pom-poms or do you own them 

On 12/28/2023 at 10:44 PM, Phill the Governor said:

Truly humbled by books that get sent my way, and I suppose there's no going back now.

A little shameless self-promotion. This unrestored copy was sent to me last week for tape removal and a clean & light press.

 

That's a beauty, the person who submitted it to you definitely doesn't lack understanding!

Am I too late to preorder a copy of the 2024 edition 

On 12/27/2023 at 10:45 PM, Brian Peck said:

Fixed. I posted it late and wasn't paying attention.

 

All good  Is it still going to be 5 total submissions across all categories per person again?

Will DeLoreans be provided or is it BYOTM (Bring Your Own Time Machines)

On 12/24/2023 at 9:07 AM, comicwiz said:

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 briva3 has used, please post and tag me. Best to all for the holiday season!

There's a bit of a workaround that I mentioned back around page ~70 or so, you still can't look up past IDs, but if you want to verify whether an ID used to belong to someone else you can check their feedback page: https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/aureliaag (There's a symbol by their name that says that this person's ID has changed recently which somewhat helps)  and then replace the ID in that url with the ID you suspect might be a previous ID of that person https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/zaneglor  If the feedbacks listed on both pages are the same, then it's the same person. 

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, don't forget to spend some time with your loved ones, this thread will still be here after the holidays don't worry 

On 12/23/2023 at 8:02 PM, Comics said:

My thought re that - I feel that eBay kicked him off for some reason (that's why the Zaglor ID doesn't lead to an inactive seller but to nothing) and they 'let' him back on with a new ID or maybe a few. So I think a lot of this is going to fall on them. I saw that @NewWorldOrder had one of the scammers previous IDs on his block list (corner142) so maybe they can remember why???

We solved that some tens of pages ago, the Zaneglor account was never kicked off, he just changed the id of that account to aureliaag, hasn't sold a book on that account since ~2020

On 12/23/2023 at 4:04 PM, Chip Cataldo said:

I just read this entire thread as I didn't read the forum for a few days.

I would like a cookie. Thank you.

On 12/23/2023 at 2:16 AM, Timed said:

As mentioned before, zaneglor has stated they have 30 plus years in comics. Would not be surprised. 

Well wasn't it mentioned before, that in the slab model used just before the change in 2016, the label was actually attached as part of the inner well. So with our current running theory of how this scam is working (replacing the inner wells of slabs), I don't think it would have been possible to do this exact exploit before the the slab iteration post July 2016. 

nevermind, I'm not gonna try anymore, I don't think I'll get anywhere. Good luck

On 12/22/2023 at 11:29 PM, Steven Valdez said:

Yep, there's definitely at least one character on here who seems almost violently opposed to any form of software-assisted grading.

I'm not sure if you're lumping me in there, so just to be clear, I'm not against it by any means, I work in software development, I just don't think there's an appreciation for how complex it would be to create. I also think some over-estimating might be going on, processing large image datasets can take a really long time, might not be as fast and efficient as people think. 

On 12/22/2023 at 11:12 PM, migmtl76 said:

Did CGC actually make a statement ?

On 12/22/2023 at 10:11 PM, BCR said:

The glaring thing to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it literal the policy of CGC that if we send in a book for re-hollering, that that book will be subjected to re-grading? 
 

It's more of a "can", not "will". It's a possibility it will be regraded, not a certainty. 

On 12/22/2023 at 9:32 PM, Prince Namor said:

I guarantee you there are millions of scanned images out there from collectors who've been doing that for a long time. On top of that CGC already has a database of stored images. It wouldn't be as difficult as you think to put together. A fair amount of work, yes, but necessary to protect the integrity of the business.

Alright, I could believe that, but are all those scans of sufficient quality? You wouldn't really know until you train the model and look at the training results I suppose. One thing that could be a source of noise is if you have scans of differing quality in the dataset, that could introduce bias in the model. There's a whole lot of dimensionality to consider here, I'm just going off the cuff with what I would be thinking if I were asked to do this. It would take a lot of work, I'm not saying its impossible, but its not as easy as just saying "train the computer to do this"

edit: Sorry I just read all the posts in this thread asking to stop the AI talk, this thread moves at lightning pace forgive me I just saw it

On 12/22/2023 at 9:31 PM, jcjames said:

AI is currently better, faster, more accurate at scanning medical imaging (which IMO is more complex than creases and spine tics) than any single human.

It didn't happen overnight, but it is possible. 

I think there's a slight confusion here

I think when you say scanning, you mean looking at an image and interpreting it, drawing conclusions from it, etc. Yeah I'm sure AI could do that for comic books if all preconditions are met for training such a model. 

When I say scanning, I mean taking a picture (taking a scan). So the concern raised by some CG expert earlier is that the picture taking technology in the current state is not sensitive enough for training a model to accurately grade. I don't believe it either personally (my main issue in that rant I went on was about data collection with the assumption all necessary machinery exists), but I was just repeating what someone else who claims to be a subject matter expert on CG (which I am not, so I kind of defer to them) said earlier .