ASM #252 CGC 9.8 Record Sale - something fishy going on? - Holder Tampering Incident confirmed by CGC 50 50

[Steven Valdez]

Prediction: CGC goes bankrupt in 2024 (from a combination of being sued, losing 99% of their business and having to do thousands of free regrades) and a new, competent company takes over, learning from CGC's many, many mistakes.

[NewWorldOrder]

On 12/30/2023 at 2:11 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.

That was the point some of us made. The boardies I see now werent around during the Ewert scandal. It wasnt to make light of what is going on now, but the hyperbolic comments that CGC slabs values will suffer and the trust is gone forever is just white noise some of have heard before, but yet the hobby keeps on trucking along.

 

[NewWorldOrder]

On 12/30/2023 at 4:04 AM, THE_BEYONDER said:

It seems that the scope of this scandal will become finite once CGC posts a list of the books impacted.

Same thing CGC did with the Ewert scandal.

Edited December 30, 2023 by NewWorldOrder

[Point Five]

On 12/30/2023 at 9:10 AM, Steven Valdez said:

Prediction: CGC goes bankrupt in 2024 (from a combination of being sued, losing 99% of their business and having to do thousands of free regrades) and a new, competent company takes over, learning from CGC's many, many mistakes.

Prediction: none of these things happen. 

 

[NewWorldOrder]

On 12/30/2023 at 6:10 AM, Steven Valdez said:

Prediction: CGC goes bankrupt in 2024 (from a combination of being sued, losing 99% of their business and having to do thousands of free regrades) and a new, competent company takes over, learning from CGC's many, many mistakes.

Are you being serious?

[shadroch]

The fish rots from the head down.

 

[Mephisto]

On 12/30/2023 at 8:22 AM, shadroch said:

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.   

It’s all about previous high quality previous images existing. Before Ewert there was the Batman 11 on Heritage I posted was a nice resin that saw a small bump in grade and big jump in sales price. Being a Golden Age boom it was easy to identify it was the exact same copy. Hammer pointed out the book was missing some of its edge compared to the previous auction image. CGC determined someone had trimmed it and then aged the trimmed edges to hide the recent trimming. I think one of the theory was throwing a blow dryer on the trimmed edges. I had been collecting Golden Age Batman and Detective books and after that incident I actually did jump ship after that incident and moved on to art. 
 

If you ever play on the sports card section of the Blowout forums there are numerous threads outing sellers who trim and bleach cards and submit them to grading companies undetected. The boards do a good job of identifying the cards in previous slabs with now shorter boarders etc. The vintage cards are easier to identify as the card board on the backs of them often have tell tale marks to basically prove it’s the exact same card that is now rocking a shorter boarder. There is one collector that runs a database so you can search for a card and check the cert number of any previously identified manipulated cards before making any purchases.

[sledgehammer]

It took some time, but I finally spotted what is in my mind, an absolute connection between a major submitter and the two names that I believe are involved with the various ebay seller IDs.

Another boardie and I have been bouncing things back and forth for many days.  @Heronext

I've made a video and took photos, of the wife of this submitter's facebook page. Just in case it is made private later.

That facebook page shows a comment from someone named Bree.

The search that I made much earlier for that name, shows someone that has lived in 3 cities, all relevant to this, including Kew Gardens NY

That search shows one of the people connected to that name, as having a name that contains the letters ZANE, which is part of the ebay ID Zaneglor..

An online search of that man, shows a woman in his family, with a name that contains GLOR.  In AZ. He also lived in Kew Gardens.

An online google search of his name, shows at one point, a comment made on facebook by his name, and right next to it, shows a comment by that same BREE name.

On the submitter's wife's facebook page, a friend of hers and her submitter husband, that BREE name, says "thanks for inviting us!"

I'm not going to call out that major submitter here, and ask for a response. It's completely feasible that he is not involved

I don't know if this info would be helpful to CGC, or not. I think it would be appropriate to ask for clarification on this, from the submitter.

@CGC Mike

 

[William-James88]

On 12/30/2023 at 9:07 AM, wiparker824 said:

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.

I don't think their market share would ever take a big hit, the competition just isn't there and does not adress the main issue arising from this which is that slabs  become a catch 22 for inserts. If it's all about buying the book and not the slab, then the main alternative is not a rival slabbing company but getting rid of the slab all together.

[NewWorldOrder]

On 12/30/2023 at 6:37 AM, Mephisto said:

If you ever play on the sports card section of the Blowout forums there are numerous threads outing sellers who trim and bleach cards and submit them to grading companies undetected. The boards do a good job of identifying the cards in previous slabs with now shorter boarders etc. The vintage cards are easier to identify as the card board on the backs of them often have tell tale marks to basically prove it’s the exact same card that is now rocking a shorter boarder. There is one collector that runs a database so you can search for a card and check the cert number of any previously identified manipulated cards before making any purchases.

Yup its crazy bad.

Sports cards collectors wish they only had a couple scams like comics do. 

 

[jeffreyk]

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 bought my Hulk 181 in CGC 9.4 around 2009.  It is in a 2nd Generation holder and it looks great.  There is no paper trail other than the check for about $2,800 when I bought it.  I dont see this scandel hurting my book value due to a lack of any other documentation, but I guess you never know.

[William-James88]

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

1000x this.  No one that actually likes this hobby wants to see CGC fail. 

This thread is showing otherwise. 

[shadroch]

On 12/30/2023 at 7:48 AM, William-James88 said:

This thread is showing otherwise. 

Management has already failed. Now, we will see if they can take down the whole business before they are shown the door.

[CGC Mike]

On 12/30/2023 at 9:38 AM, sledgehammer said:

I don't know if this info would be helpful to CGC, or not. 

@CGC Mike

We would appreciate it if the video, photos and above post be submitted to the e-mail I have provided in the announcement.  If you do not wish to send them in, I would be more than happy to do it.  Just send me the above 3 things in a PM.  

[Steven Valdez]

The last 20+ years worth of CGC'd books are unverified now in terms of their stated grades. ANY of them can be (or have been) swapped out from case to case. If the book inside is actually the grade stated, it'll need to cracked out first to verify that.

[grendel013]

On 12/30/2023 at 9:38 AM, sledgehammer said:

It took some time, but I finally spotted what is in my mind, an absolute connection between a major submitter and the two names that I believe are involved with the various ebay seller IDs.

Another boardie and I have been bouncing things back and forth for many days.  @Heronext

I've made a video and took photos, of the wife of this submitter's facebook page. Just in case it is made private later.

That facebook page shows a comment from someone named Bree.

The search that I made much earlier for that name, shows someone that has lived in 3 cities, all relevant to this, including Kew Gardens NY

That search shows one of the people connected to that name, as having a name that contains the letters ZANE, which is part of the ebay ID Zaneglor..

An online search of that man, shows a woman in his family, with a name that contains GLOR.  In AZ. He also lived in Kew Gardens.

An online google search of his name, shows at one point, a comment made on facebook by his name, and right next to it, shows a comment by that same BREE name.

On the submitter's wife's facebook page, a friend of hers and her submitter husband, that BREE name, says "thanks for inviting us!"

I'm not going to call out that major submitter here, and ask for a response. It's completely feasible that he is not involved

I don't know if this info would be helpful to CGC, or not. I think it would be appropriate to ask for clarification on this, from the submitter.

@CGC Mike

 

Can you share your video? I'd love to see the details.

[sledgehammer]

On 12/30/2023 at 8:59 AM, grendel013 said:

Can you share your video? I'd love to see the details.

I've sent Mike everything that I think is relevant.

[paqart]

On 12/30/2023 at 12:52 AM, BlancoBros said:

Agreed. Just like car accidents. You have a minor fender bender, pay cash so your premiums don't go.
But, if you have a major accident, cars totaled, people hurt; go with your insurance.

And that's what we have here: A major accident. With a possibly for a class-action lawsuit.

My friend didn't think this qualifies as what you call a "major accident." He said that the way something like this works is that the company has Stop Loss insurance. With Stop Loss, a company decides that they can lose a million or a hundred million dollars a year for various reasons, and accept it as a cost of business. This can be a combination of theft by customers, theft by insiders, unintended consequences of bad decisions, natural disasters, and so on. With stop loss, anything above that amount, and it is generally set very high, and the stop loss kicks in to cover the damage. For CGC to invoke it, they'd need ten scandals like this at once before they'd make a claim.

[namisgr]

On 12/30/2023 at 9:59 AM, Steven Valdez said:

The last 20+ years worth of CGC'd books are unverified now in terms of their stated grades. ANY of them can be (or have been) swapped out from case to case. If the book inside is actually the grade stated, it'll need to cracked out first to verify that.

That's throwing out a whole lot of babies with their bathwater.

[Dr. Love]

On 12/30/2023 at 1:56 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. 

Just so.  Red pill yourself, this thing we think of as a book, once slabbed, is just an image and then became  just a number.  Like the idea of money itself, a dream within a dream!