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

[Steven Valdez]

On 1/1/2024 at 1:26 AM, MyNameIsLegion said:

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.  

Don't need them to be airtight or waterproof...  all I'm suggesting is they cannot be opened without breaking the pillars, rather than 'that just popped out with no resistance at all' as Immaculate Comics noted when he was testing it.

[pdags]

On 12/31/2023 at 9:41 AM, Steven Valdez said:

all I'm suggesting is they cannot be opened without breaking the pillars

Yeah, the pins/corners need to shatter under every condition that CGC can dream up.  It'll always be a game of cat and mouse with scammers, but it shouldn't be trivial.

Edited December 31, 2023 by pdags

[Sigur Ros]

On 12/31/2023 at 7:12 AM, AbsoluteCarnage said:

saw some of the cgc new protection in place as I responded on my Villain thread.............

 

 

I keep getting that and then the page just dies.  Comment doesn't get posted.

edit: didn't get it that time.

Edited December 31, 2023 by Sigur Ros

[Steven Valdez]

Dealer sitting on $500K worth of CGC books: "This is just a glitch, it'll all blow over by early next week."

Actual collectors:

 

Edited December 31, 2023 by Steven Valdez

[RobHW]

On 12/30/2023 at 9:09 PM, RobHW said:

I hate this has happened.  I love what CGC has done for collecting comics.  But I fear this is catastrophic.  One skilled swapper can do an untold amount of contamination.  Yet there could be more than one swapper.  I'm convinced a skilled and practiced hand could swap undetected all day.  Even 3 digit value books could be worth swapping.  My God, we are undone.  For crying out loud, the only reason this was caught was the hubris of the swapper.  Do you realize any sold and returned slabbed book may well have been returned swapped?  While we sat smugly confident, thieves have rotted our world from the inside out.  

I think our community as a whole is in shock, unable or unwilling to comprehend what has happened.  Understand - we have been swindled, all of us.  We all have high-grade books.  The engine of this hobby is the full faith and trust in CGC.  That's gone, see?  You may trust your own books,, but that's not what a CGC slab meant.  Many of our books now look more like confederate money. If you don't have a sick feeling in your gut about this then it's time to lose the over confidence.  That's what got us here in the first place.

[MyNameIsLegion]

On 12/31/2023 at 8:43 AM, pdags said:

Yeah, the pins/corners need to shatter under every condition that CGC can dream up.  It'll always be a game of cat and mouse with scammers, but it shouldn't be trivial.

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. 

Edited December 31, 2023 by MyNameIsLegion

[EastEnd1]

On 12/31/2023 at 9:51 AM, Steven Valdez said:

Dealer sitting on $500K worth of CGC books: "This is just a glitch, it'll all blow over by early next week."

Actual collectors:

 

Funny thing is we ARE aligned... I love my CGC slabs and have plenty of invested capital sitting there too.  The last thing I want is for CGC to be undermined.  But burying your head in the sand isn't going to fix this or make it go away.  Even if it did blow over in a few weeks, the holder is too vulnerable, and further scandals will happen... and that won't be good for either collectors or dealers.

[Sigur Ros]

Wish I could...

[MAR1979]

On 12/30/2023 at 5:58 PM, THE_BEYONDER said:

New reholder protocols I assume.

Perhaps something like, Open your eyes and look at the book?

Edited December 31, 2023 by MAR1979

[EastEnd1]

On 12/31/2023 at 9:52 AM, MyNameIsLegion said:

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. 

I think CGC would be happy to implement the tightest and strongest measures... the question becomes, what would they have to charge their customers in exchange, and would the market bear that additional cost?  At some point, the equation doesn't work anymore, and the books that would justify the added cost of grading would be a smaller and smaller population, which could put the viability of the service in question.  It's a tough balance that CGC has to manage.

 

[Nick Furious]

On 12/31/2023 at 7:25 AM, Sigur Ros said:

@cgcmike  can you confirm that this is acceptable procedure at CGC?  That we can just send a sealed book and some label and it gets reholdered?

Things aren't really that careless there are they?

And here I thought this guy was a huge fan?   Why would he point out such a huge flaw?

 

When I re-holder I just request a holder and label be sent to me and I put it together myself.  Saves everyone a bunch of time and money.

[DougC]

On 12/31/2023 at 9:05 AM, MAR1979 said:

Perhaps, Open your eyes and look at the book?

guess i'll have to hope some of those old adds are still valid in my 12 centers... going need those x-ray glasses to see the missing MVS, centerfolds, etc.

[namisgr]

On 12/31/2023 at 9:52 AM, RobHW said:

I think our community as a whole is in shock, unable or unwilling to comprehend what has happened.  Understand - we have been swindled, all of us.  We all have high-grade books.  The engine of this hobby is the full faith and trust in CGC.  That's gone, see?  You may trust your own books,, but that's not what a CGC slab meant.  Many of our books now look more like confederate money. If you don't have a sick feeling in your gut about this then it's time to lose the over confidence.  That's what got us here in the first place.

Why the sudden consternation?  For 24 years, CGC has provided a generally well accepted product, but with caveats that have included grading, restoration, and quality control issues all.  CGC has assigned blue labels to restored comics, purple labels to 100% unrestored comics, gift grades, overly strict grades, and sometimes inconsistent grades.  They've slabbed books with the wrong labels, the wrong grade and page quality designations on labels, and with slabs that have optical artifacts that obscure and mar the appearance of the books inside.

But, and as is true with the present and major problem with slab tampering and an inexcusable quality control gap in the reholdering process, they assign a reasonable grade and an accurate restoration check to the vast majority of books they encapsulate.  The product has taken, while not all, most of the uncertainty out of buying valuable and pricey books without the need for seeing the books in person.

So while I share feelings that this is a significant set of blunders by the company, until such time as evidence comes forth that the problem is more widespread or insidious that has currently been shown, this does not completely obviate the trust the hobby has placed in third party grading.

Let's see how the company chooses to handle the problems with holder tampering and reholdering exploitation, and deals with the many collectors who own comics whose grade designations are called into question based on the track record of fraud by a certain submitter.

[Steven Valdez]

On 1/1/2024 at 2:11 AM, DougC said:

guess i'll have to hope some of those old adds are still valid in my 12 centers... going need those x-ray glasses to see the missing MVS, centerfolds, etc.

Too bad if that X-Ray specs ad has been clipped though....

[MyNameIsLegion]

On 12/30/2023 at 3:56 AM, BrashL said:

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.  

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. 

Edited December 31, 2023 by MyNameIsLegion

[namisgr]

That's a leap to ascribe the downfall of reading comics with third party grading and encapsulation of valuable back issues.  There are still a couple of orders of magnitude more unslabbed back issue comics for reading and collecting than there are slabs that can no longer be read, unless the owner chooses to crack the books out.  And linking back issue encapsulation with the long running decline in the new comic book market doesn't make sense.

[sledgehammer]

On 12/31/2023 at 8:26 AM, drotto said:

On 12/31/2023 at 8:12 AM, pdags said:

But we don't know for certain if what Briva3 was doing showed any notable damage to the slabs.

But, he was asking for label changes, this should trigger a full re-evaluation also.

You don't know that. He may have asked for an MJ notation, but he may have asked for a custom label, and then reminded them at some point later in status that it appeared to him that there was an MJ insert inside the sealed holder and sealed inner well.

[HotKey]

Has anyone with a large personal collection of the at risk comics contacted their insurance company to see how they are going to approach insuring values on potentially fraudulent cases?

[MyNameIsLegion]

On 12/31/2023 at 9:46 AM, HotKey said:

Has anyone with a large personal collection of the at risk comics contacted their insurance company to see how they are going to approach insuring values on potentially fraudulent cases?

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. 

[MAR1979]

  

On 12/31/2023 at 1:53 AM, Steven Valdez said:

Remember, any tell-tale scuffs or scratches can be easily buffed out using Polywatch 

 

For years I've used PlastX (a headlight cleaner) it works nicely on light to medium scuff and light scratches. However it requires a whole lot of elbow grease, once I even badly heat friction burned my thumb. Perhaps I'll test out this Polywatch?

Edited December 31, 2023 by MAR1979