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ASM #252 CGC 9.8 Record Sale - something fishy going on? - Holder Tampering Incident confirmed by CGC
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Started by spidermanbeyond,

9,030 posts in this topic

Mdesimone

Mdesimone

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On 12/29/2023 at 11:54 PM, agamoto said:

B. R.? The ExpressJet flight attendant from Metropolitan ave in Queens? As we've discussed in the thread before, about this person specifically, it could very well be an assumed identity, a girlfriend's account, etc. All the more reason to call the FBI/BCI and not CGC first.

Different name 

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BrashL

BrashL

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On 12/30/2023 at 1:41 AM, Matt1982 said:

CGC will be facing some very difficult choices in the very near future. Changing their case/process is a no-brainer. Their entire product is trust - not plastic - and they’ve lost that for now because a huge flaw in their product has been exposed. Whether they win that trust back will depend on their response.

Hey CGC - I think you provide a valuable service and I’ll continue to be a good customer, but you need to step up here. Communicate as soon as you can and do the right thing to make injured customers whole, even if it means short-term losses. The alternative will be long-term catastrophe.

1000x this.  No one that actually likes this hobby wants to see CGC fail. That said there’s a real problem here that CGC has to solve. Once they release the new case (which is non-negotiable at this point given the bad PR around it specifically) and new process I’ll be happy to send my valuable slabs in to be updated.  The stuff that’s not worth scamming will be just fine in the older ones.  People will be pissed for a little while but if the new case is an upgrade they’d have likely done it anyway.  

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COI

COI

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You guys remember when pressing in and of itself was controversial? Most of you probably don't. 15 to 20 years later, the lesson I learned is that the actual contents of a slab is far less important than what's written on the label. It was inconceivable to me back then that the market would ever be okay with paying a significant premium for some '9.6' when there was a real possibility that the '9.6' in question was sitting in a '9.0' holder just weeks prior. How quaint, right? 

I'm not saying that this situation is analogous to pressing; what I am saying is that the pressing scandal and subsequent change in paradigm surrounding the practice is evidence that the vast majority of people trading in slabs will do the mental gymnastics required to move past this scandal as well, because focusing on the label and ignoring the contents of the slab is the entire game. How else can you explain the market adapting so easily to pressing, or forgetting that there may be tons of unaccounted for 'Ewert Specials'. OR for that matter, the very fact that there is a premium for WHITE pages, or the sometimes obscene price spreads at those arbitrary 9.6-9.9 levels on common-as-dirt books?

The label is all that matters. No one is going to stop buying Hulk 181s because there is some unknown percentile chance that some of them may be qualified books in universal holders. I'm not saying this is good or bad, right or wrong, nor am I saying I agree with the mindset, but that's where we are. No one cares about what's in the slab; what they care about is that the cert number on their book isn't on a list. Some number of provable examples will surface and be taken care of, based on the efforts of CGC and some motivated collectors, then the 15, 25, 35 percent-ish of terminally online buyers who are even aware that this happened at all will move on.

The community isn't going to sacrifice the golden goose because of a bunch of missing value stamps, tattooz, or over graded Mark Jewelers copies, especially in the context of a market where the grading company under scrutiny holds 90%+ of the market share, just as they didn't sacrifice the goose over violated principles in the pressing scandal, or violated books in the Ewert scandal. 

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AbsoluteCarnage

AbsoluteCarnage

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On 12/30/2023 at 4:56 AM, COI said:

You guys remember when pressing in and of itself was controversial? Most of you probably don't. 15 to 20 years later, the lesson I learned is that the actual contents of a slab is far less important than what's written on the label. It was inconceivable to me back then that the market would ever be okay with paying a significant premium for some '9.6' when there was a real possibility that the '9.6' in question was sitting in a '9.0' holder just weeks prior. How quaint, right? 

I'm not saying that this situation is analogous to pressing; what I am saying is that the pressing scandal and subsequent change in paradigm surrounding the practice is evidence that the vast majority of people trading in slabs will do the mental gymnastics required to move past this scandal as well, because focusing on the label and ignoring the contents of the slab is the entire game. How else can you explain the market adapting so easily to pressing, or forgetting that there may be tons of unaccounted for 'Ewert Specials'. OR for that matter, the very fact that there is a premium for WHITE pages, or the sometimes obscene price spreads at those arbitrary 9.6-9.9 levels on common-as-dirt books?

The label is all that matters. No one is going to stop buying Hulk 181s because there is some unknown percentile chance that some of them may be qualified books in universal holders. I'm not saying this is good or bad, right or wrong, nor am I saying I agree with the mindset, but that's where we are. No one cares about what's in the slab; what they care about is that the cert number on their book isn't on a list. Some number of provable examples will surface and be taken care of, based on the efforts of CGC and some motivated collectors, then the 15, 25, 35 percent-ish of terminally online buyers who are even aware that this happened at all will move on.

The community isn't going to sacrifice the golden goose because of a bunch of missing value stamps, tattooz, or over graded Mark Jewelers copies, especially in the context of a market where the grading company under scrutiny holds 90%+ of the market share, just as they didn't sacrifice the goose over violated principles in the pressing scandal, or violated books in the Ewert scandal. 

You make alot of good points I have a boatload of disagreements with regards to ppl accepting labels are all that matter. I've loved some of your posts COI so I'm not gonna dig deep into this one. We're in a rough situation We're all burnt on this one.

 

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Steven Valdez

Steven Valdez

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On 12/30/2023 at 9:35 PM, AbsoluteCarnage said:

Problem with CGC accepting MVS screw ups is it doesn't take into account the ppl that already scammed the system now trying to defraud cgc with books they torched themselves. People will definitely need a paper trail.

Gnarly to think how many crooks are currently self-upgrading their green labels to blue, now that the simplicity of doing so has been demonstrated.

Even if only 5% of dealers are smarmy enough to do this, that's still a tonne of fraud books about to flood the market.

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AbsoluteCarnage

AbsoluteCarnage

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On 12/30/2023 at 5:46 AM, Steven Valdez said:

Gnarly to think how many crooks are currently self-upgrading their green labels to blue, now that the simplicity of doing so has been demonstrated.

Even if only 5% of dealers are smarmy enough to do this, that's still a tonne of fraud books about to flood the market.

lol just gonna pm you

don't wanna give anyone ideas on what my original thought was

 

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SpiderParker

SpiderParker

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On 12/30/2023 at 5:35 AM, AbsoluteCarnage said:

Problem with CGC accepting MVS screw ups is it doesn't take into account the ppl that already scammed the system now trying to defraud cgc with books they torched themselves. People will definitely need a paper trail.

I agree people need a paper trail but how many cash deals are done at comic shows / cons?  Transactions like this have no paper trail. 

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RonS2112

RonS2112

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On 12/30/2023 at 7:36 AM, WolverineX said:

I eagerly await this new pedigree. 

I know this comment is intended as tongue-in-cheek, but offering a free pedigree label for these books would be a really cheap, quick way for CGC to create value which might help compensate the owners of these affected books.

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sledgehammer

sledgehammer

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On 12/30/2023 at 4:11 AM, Steven Valdez said:

I've seen talk of a 'micro-trimming' scandal where the micro-trimming was imperceptible. Um, so how was it perceived??

Just wondering, I missed that whole scandal entirely.

The same way that this one was.

Photographic proof of a book CHANGING.

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shadroch

shadroch

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On 12/30/2023 at 3:11 AM, Steven Valdez said:

I've seen talk of a 'micro-trimming' scandal where the micro-trimming was imperceptible. Um, so how was it perceived??

Just wondering, I missed that whole scandal entirely.

A former dealer member named Brent had a group of HG Thors that he sold. He kept HQ scans of them, and the books appeared in slabs with trimming that was only obvious when the slabs were compared to the scans.  CGC banned Ewert from the business, but not his deep-pocketed partner nor the Florida-based auction house that seemed to have been caught red-handed trying to sneak some books in after the announcement.   

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oakman29

oakman29

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Just another thing that is ruined for me... You know, I have to drive around in a work truck that has some spider thing around my catalytic converter that makes incredible noise all day every day , just because jerks steal them. I have to suffer not to lose my stuff. Well here we go again.....

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wiparker824

wiparker824

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On 12/30/2023 at 5:51 AM, RonS2112 said:

I know this comment is intended as tongue-in-cheek, but offering a free pedigree label for these books would be a really cheap, quick way for CGC to create value which might help compensate the owners of these affected books.

CGC doesn’t want these books to exist at all. They definitely don’t want to promote them with a new label. CGC has the backing of Blackstone. They can pay up to compensate a few hundred books, it’s not a big deal financially to them. The credibility hit and potentially losing market share over this on the other hand, well I’m sure that’s a very real threat they’re scrambling over.

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