MyNameIsLegion

Lots of straw here. We haven’t spent a lot of time discussing the inner well, but this isn’t anything approaching a five figure investment, you pulled that number out of your butt. Gaming the inner well is likely the easiest of material components of a slab to replicate. I think you have an image in your head of some dork with a butter knife an exacto blade and some superglue trying to swap the inner well? Why do that when you can just stick it in a brand new one? You think CGC has some special stock of those that cannot be reproduced exactly for relative pennies? Any petroleum derivatives are the most easily fabricated substances on earth at scale and in prototyping. You can prototype an entire sports shoe from China for hundreds of dollars, this is child’s play. I think there was a link earlier in this thread to PSA card blanks and sealing machines on Alibaba. If the eBay of China is openly advertising the materials and equipment to fake authentication then the idea is not fantasy, not theory, not an outlier or a rarity. It’s a viable business model with minimal barriers to entry. Downplaying this thread as an isolated incident and labeling anyone that says otherwise as alarmist, or whatever is intellectually dishonest. You don’t want any of it to be true. Nor does any other collector with six figures invested in CGC assets that factor prominently in their projected net worth and future retirement that factors into the rationalization in their head and to their wives on why they should spend thousands on comics magically worth more for the blessed sacraments bestowed upon them in a plastic shell.

yeah I wondered something similar on the insurance side of things about 40-50 pages back. Not sure anyone took it up, I've slept since then and don't have a sharp enough machete and napalm to work my way back that far. Another fraud scheme you could pursue would be to file an insurance loss on a bunch of 9.8 slabs that were swapped out DIY with lesser grades. A little fire damage or outright theft would be enough to obscure any holder tampering. Then take your insurance money and slab the real 9.8's again.

au contraire - the hobby existed for 60 years without them- one might argue that CGC is why the hobby is going down the tubes. All the money is getting siphoned into a narrow corner of the market (slabs) at increasingly inflated amounts. No one is reading comics, they're just entombing them unread in a plastic coffin hoping their stock in that issue rises. After the boomers cycle out, younger generations will be left scratching their heads wondering what all THAT was about and at some point Goodwill is going to see trunk-loads of slabbed books not worth case cost. CGC was marketed as a service, it's initial raison d'etre seemed to make sense. But for the last 10 years CGC has been unabashedly NOT a service, but a product. You are buying the plastic case and the label. CGC is probably due what happened to comic publishing and then comic stores in the late 90's when they almost went under. Greed and unsustainable growth NEVER end well for most people. But the few people that do profit from it will run it into the ground on the way down with nothing but fervor and trumpets.

I think the only solution here would be to not use pins constructed of the same materials and therefor vulnerable to the sonic welder, like rivets. But that goes back to my earlier point, time and cost added to the process of holdering or opening to reholder. The sweet-spot for them will heavily favor efficiency and cost at the expense of quality and security. what would really be the kick in the teeth is they turn this into an opportunity to offer "enhanced slab options" A bomb-proof slab that's guaranteed to be secure for 2X the price. Standard pricing remains in the current holder. Any reholder order comes with a "free" press and regrade of the books. There's just so many ways to monetize their lack of quality and make it a profit center at the customers expense.

so, the new strategy for selling in this post-Holdergate world is to highlight BA slabs that have scratches and nicks, scuffs and surface wear to ensure it hasn't been monkeyed with. Just lay those new slabs out on the floor around the litter box and let the cats trample them a bit.

I don't think it's done to be airtight or watertight- it's just "good enough" to make it fast. They didn't build these to be reusable either. They designed them to be quick to assemble firstly, and reholder if necessary because they have thousands to do a week. Anything to shave off time and increase their throughput.

Respectfully, I think we underestimate machine learning. Once you establish the lingo, (CF, LRC, spike tick, spin stress, etc etc) It's going ot learn pretty fast. Having such a large data set is a huge advantage. Eventually it would be telling you how many times the notes were incongruent with the images.

Even more importantly, CGC has the scans, grades and notes on hundreds of thousands of books. AI wouldn't need to be trained in real time so much as loaded with reference examples of books, especially SA to Moderns for all grades, with a multitude of examples of the cumulative defects that were (in theory) used in arriving at the final grade. I know Roy likes to wax poetic about the human element, the je ne sais quoi if it, the touch the feel of paper, the fabric of our lives, the smell, oooh that smell, can't you smell that smell, blah blah. Well that's the point, to remove the subjective bias of individual graders that governs the difference between a 9.4 and a 9.6m a 0.6 and a 9.8. Each grade of a specific book can be instantly weighted against the average of all previous examples of books in that grade, with similar defects, instantaneously. Humans can't do that. Imagine bouncing every 8.0 Hulk 181 ever graded against the current copy under consideration to determine if the grade is in range. also pointed out in this thread, once the mechanical and procedural aspects were properly set aside (goal posts!) AI could be the pre-screen agent, and the QC that is sorely lacking now as CGC incorporates AI into the grading process iteratively. You don't need 45 full time graders, you probably need less than 10 once you eliminate the need for pre-grades, multiple graders, QA etc. the current process is founded on the limitations of the human element, AI eliminates off of that. I realize that's scary for some people, people will lose their jobs or be freed up to do other things, which is sometimes euphemistic for "you're job is obsolete" THAT'S the underlying anxiety of the naysayers. Suddenly their feelings of superiority and expertise, that they are better graders than 99% of other dealers and collectors is moot. The eventual progression of this is that you could prescreen a comic with your phone from an app from someone like CGC to get a pre-screen estimated grade of your book to see if it's a good candidate for slabbing. You make it a subscription rather than a service. There are so many possibilities and business models of how this could be monetized it's crazy, but not so scary as some would want you to think. those with their head in the sand, or elsewhere wind up in a self full-filling prophecy, because they are the first ones to be displaced, left behind, and obsolete.

Stickers!

wait, isn't slabbing it yourself the problem?

hmm, my Batman #181 missing the CF and all my MJI did sell at MCS, some just this week....

OMG that 's AI......

anyone think there's an insurance angle here? A collector files a loss because they recertify or reholder a book that was tampered with and it come back a lower grade and worth significantly less? What the biggest $$$ amount known to be dodgy so far? $15K?

we're not the stakeholders, we are customers.

+1

MCS, which already doens't think much of CGC grades now might reconsider accepting slabs as-is in certain circumstances. Maybe Borock can come full circle back to CGC since he's back in Gatorland. That means Matt has to ho to HA first, then Clink, then MCS.

yeah but what's Matt going to do about it right now? in practical terms they probably have contracts with their supplier in China to produce tens of thousands of holders this next year or longer, they have thousands in the supply chain and in their warehouse now. they aren't going to eat those. They can't R&D a new holder overnight. They're in the middle of their first fiscal quarter, or about to start their first quarter and everything in the budget is set. they might consider a new holder design when they plan next years budget in the summer. Most likely response- a few weeks of internal data collection, solutioning some process improvements to prevent the known scam, and more scrutiny of any reholder of certain accounts, new accounts, or spot checks of every 100 or whatever. A vague statement about the issue, with zero specifics and no public disclosure of known books from this seller, and an offer to recertify on request select books if and only if they come up for sale or through an auction house. Something that compartmentalizes each slab and each owner to be handled on a case by case basis "to protect the privacy of owners" and contain the contagion of any public narrative. "Doing the right thing" means something very different to a business that is a footnote in a trillion dollar VC portfolio than it does the man on the street.

the holder, the holder.

Well, in Roy’s defense, he’s Canadian. They moved the goal post, the field, added players, kick the ball whenever they feel threatened. Utter CFL chaos!

Merry Christmas ASM #252 CGC 9.8 Record Sale - something fishy going on? thread. You're the grift that keeps on giving!

There’s plenty of equipment now that can detect chemical composition (spectrometer) and detect odors (olfactometer) that will be infinitely more precise. That’s decades old technology that doesn’t catch a cold or have allergies. “Bob’s a little stuffy today, we can’t grade these White Mountains” of course some hourly flunky will be turning pages but AI can do absolutely all of the complex scoring to determine an impartial grade.. Robots build cars and microchips now, do you honestly think examining a comic book is a real challenge? (Insert “ok boomer” meme here- despite the fact that I believe we are the same age)

Well that tells you 2 things: 1. They are acutely aware of the scandal. 2. They care not one bit what goes on here on the boards because it’s a relatively small audience of geezers they don’t care about that won’t go viral in any meaningful way. But now that they are trying to put out the fire on social media well now they are probably going to get reamed even worse for it.

see, I wasn't too far off when I posted this 2 days ago: "PSA GRADING CARD SLABS PLASTIC ULTRASONIC WELDING MACHINE" He probably cut his teeth on cards before moving to comics.

yeah, but after a book has been submitted and then resold- the next owner can't check the MVS, tattoos, page count, or any other hidden defect, now can they? Now we are losing degrees of confidence that the grade is accurate with zero remedy to do any additional due diligence. But you might have paid an extra $500 to recoup the cost of the slab on a key.