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

[Stefan_W]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:43 PM, Mdesimone said:

Curious do shop owners make millions by submitting customer books to cgc for them? 

Some pressers roll books at a pretty high clip and can make a living through the cost of pressing. They often include submissions as a part of the package, but the markup on sending books in is usually negligible - most of the time people see the value in sharing shipping costs to and from CGC (especially in Canada where these shipping costs are pretty outrageous). If someone tries to mark up submission charges by a decent amount they will find themselves without customers pretty quickly. At least that is how it goes up here. 

[comicjel]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:47 PM, sledgehammer said:

just making the case as I see it. I did the same thing with O.J. Simpson. Lol.

Just remember, it's a pretty small percentage of comic books, I would think, like Hulk High value 181s, that come out of the slabs.

my guess is, the same, applies to 9.8 Spider-Man comics

Generally, you can count on them being sold as slabs, for years and years.

 

I would agree with the 9.8s - probably never cracked out - but the green to blue books were not 9.8s and they were definitely books with grades and values that would be common to try for a bump up.

... and think about the ASM 252 that started all this - aren't you surprised that the buyer had not looked at the last sale himself and see that the first sale was without the MJI (I apologize to whoever that was!)?

All I am saying is that if I were the store owner, and more and more books were being churned this way, and I was fully aware of the scam, I would be stressed constantly!! - I would never let the guy use my account, and show off all the scammed books in the store's Instagram page.

... but again, there is that heat gun!

  

[sledgehammer]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:01 PM, comicjel said:

I would agree with the 9.8s - probably never cracked out - but the green to blue books were not 9.8s and they were definitely books with grades and values that would be common to try for a bump up.

there's already been mentioned in this thread, that someone has sworn that they cracked a blue label Hulk in the past, and there was no marvel value stamp

A hell of a lot of good complaining about that did him.

[bc]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:29 PM, sledgehammer said:

at this point, there is no indication that anybody wasn't able to keep it to themselves. If it wouldn't have been, for the certification numbers. showing up on GPA, and CGC deciding to start putting scans in the graders notes last summer, there is almost no chance that anybody would be the wiser today.

Until I hear differently, the fact that everybody involved, started creating corporations, within seven, to 10 days of this being outed, makes it seem iincredibly naïve, to think that the first one that did is not heavily involved.

Been thinking about his specifically when I read #59 from the other lawsuit docs:

 

Then this statement:

The wife in that case "represented the company at trade shows and conventions" during her tenure from June 22-whenever they let her go. They are also accused of selling swapped books at conventions during this timeframe.

Now we have pics of this dynamic duo at conventions.

Probably just a pure coincidence....

-bc

Edited February 5 by bc
clarification

[MAR1979]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:15 PM, comicjel said:

... yes, you make a good point!, there was that heat gun!

It just seems like the type of scam, that once you start successfully pulling it off, you would keep it to yourself.  There does not appear to be an aspect of it that requires two "outside" people to make it work.

I guess I want to believe that a business owner, with a pretty good gig, would not mess around with something like this!

 

<sarcasm> A Comic Store Owner/Dealer would never do anything the least bid shady </sarcasm>

Edited February 5 by MAR1979

[Buzzetta]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:39 PM, shadroch said:

If I had a customer who submitted millions of dollars worth of books through my store, I'd invite him for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Most shops operate on thin margins, and a steady flow of income for submitting the guy's books would seem like a godsend.  

I'd like to give the shop owner the benefit of the doubt, for now. 

 

On 2/5/2024 at 5:43 PM, Mdesimone said:

Curious do shop owners make millions by submitting customer books to cgc for them? 

They do when they are swapping books.  

Shad do you remember the hub-bub around Blu Comics?  That was the store that closed around 11 or 12 years ago in the Massapequa / Park / Amityville area. 

• First store was in Amityville a little past 110 on Merrick Rd
• They were originally named Blu Planet as they were selling Blu Ray Disc and importing non US titles eventually getting in trouble for violating street dates
• Got in trouble for not paying employees 
• Eventually moved to Massapequa across the street from Krischs' Ice Cream by the Massapequa train station.
• He got in trouble with the comic community after scamming people on Magic the Gathering cases of cards.  Told his customers who complained to, "die of AIDs"
• That went viral as even Bleeding Cool ran with a story about the store and shop owner. 
• Guy was cheating people to make the bills. 
• Guy was eventually dragged out of his own store by the Sheriff since it turned out he was living in the store as he lost his apartment
• Store eventually closed. 

When he was at the Amityville location, I was invited to come take a look at the place because a former comic shop employee was now working there from a former store I had shopped at.  Blu Planet was trying to get new customers.  The store owner at the time gave me a hard sell to send in my books for me.  The former store worker was standing behind him and shook his head as to say, "no."  I thanked but no thanked him.

Why?

Employee calls me later and told me the store owner wasn't paying employees unless they were trying to bring in new customers but not to shop there and not to give him my books to hand in.  Why?  The store owner was swapping books.  If you submitted a book of value that he already had like an ASM 300, he submitted his as well and kept the better graded of the two books.  His scam was to swap his books with customer books when possible. 

He was later accused of that as well and people stopped dropping off books with him.   I would NEVER recommend ANYONE submitting their books through someone else on anything other than their account. 

There are a LOT of bad actors out there. 

[comicjel]

On 2/5/2024 at 6:05 PM, sledgehammer said:

there's already been mentioned in this thread, that someone has sworn that they cracked a blue label Hulk in the past, and there was no marvel value stamp

A hell of a lot of good complaining about that did him.

If I bought a nice looking Hulk 181 in say 9.0 that I thought could get a 9.2, I would have sent it to CGC still in the case to get pressed and graded - think about that chain reaction... CGC calls me to tell me that it had a stamp clipped out - I say, WTF! - I counted on you guys to not have missed this when you originally graded it - I want a reimbursement for my economic loss! - CGC goes back to see the original book grading records and sees that it is different... CGC can easily see the account that was used was the CBS.

Maybe he knew the scam and felt very over confident, but I would never have such confidence with a scam like this - I can see a guy (maybe with not much starting net worth??) hiding behind a bunch of EBAY accounts, but I am having a tougher time picturing a family man with a well known store, who's career revolves around comics subjecting himself to this risk.   

[Buzzetta]

On 2/5/2024 at 6:18 PM, comicjel said:

If I bought a nice looking Hulk 181 in say 9.0 that I thought could get a 9.2, I would have sent it to CGC still in the case to get pressed and graded - think about that chain reaction... CGC calls me to tell me that it had a stamp clipped out - I say, WTF! - I counted on you guys to not have missed this when you originally graded it - I want a reimbursement for my economic loss! - CGC goes back to see the original book grading records and sees that it is different... CGC can easily see the account that was used was the CBS.

Maybe he knew the scam and felt very over confident, but I would never have such confidence with a scam like this - I can see a guy (maybe with not much starting net worth??) hiding behind a bunch of EBAY accounts, but I am having a tougher time picturing a family man with a well known store, who's career revolves around comics subjecting himself to this risk.   

CGC HAS legitimately missed things though.  I sent in a Superman 3 book with a married centerfold and it was trimmed.  Book came back as missing the centerfold with no notes on the trimming.  I received the exact same book that I sent in.  The tape on the spine was indistinguishable.   CGC took it back and marked it as complete but trimmed on the second go around.

Mistakes do happen and I do not believe that anything would have triggered a response by CGC that their graders were scamming anyone. 

A nice ending to that story is that this prompted me to buy a better copy and I now have two copies of Superman 3, one of my all time favorite Superman covers. 

[sledgehammer]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:18 PM, comicjel said:

If I bought a nice looking Hulk 181 in say 9.0 that I thought could get a 9.2, I would have sent it to CGC still in the case to get pressed and graded - think about that chain reaction... CGC calls me to tell me that it had a stamp clipped out - I say, WTF! - I counted on you guys to not have missed this when you originally graded it - I want a reimbursement for my economic loss! - CGC goes back to see the original book grading records and sees that it is different... CGC can easily see the account that was used was the CBS.

Maybe he knew the scam and felt very over confident, but I would never have such confidence with a scam like this - I can see a guy (maybe with not much starting net worth??) hiding behind a bunch of EBAY accounts, but I am having a tougher time picturing a family man with a well known store, who's career revolves around comics subjecting himself to this risk.   

yes, it sounds like he really would've been in some serious economic trouble, the one or two times that could possibly have happened.

I think that you've made up your mind. I'm totally OK with that.

👍

 

[comicjel]

On 2/5/2024 at 6:23 PM, sledgehammer said:

yes, it sounds like he really would've been in some serious economic trouble, the one or two times that could possibly have happened.

I think that you've made up your mind. I'm totally OK with that.

👍

 

It's not made up... I am rooting for him to have been duped, but I won't be shocked to find out otherwise.

[Mdesimone]

On 2/5/2024 at 6:18 PM, comicjel said:

If I bought a nice looking Hulk 181 in say 9.0 that I thought could get a 9.2, I would have sent it to CGC still in the case to get pressed and graded - think about that chain reaction... CGC calls me to tell me that it had a stamp clipped out - I say, WTF! - I counted on you guys to not have missed this when you originally graded it - I want a reimbursement for my economic loss! - CGC goes back to see the original book grading records and sees that it is different... CGC can easily see the account that was used was the CBS.

Maybe he knew the scam and felt very over confident, but I would never have such confidence with a scam like this - I can see a guy (maybe with not much starting net worth??) hiding behind a bunch of EBAY accounts, but I am having a tougher time picturing a family man with a well known store, who's career revolves around comics subjecting himself to this risk.   

Yes I wouldn’t take the risk either as a shop, I would ask 2 of my friends to list books on eBay under their accounts and give them a cut of the profits. Also would be able to bump up those bids and if I won then we can cancel the auction since ya know we’re friends.

[comicjel]

On 2/5/2024 at 6:30 PM, Mdesimone said:

Yes I wouldn’t take the risk either as a shop, I would ask 2 of my friends to list books on eBay under their accounts and give them a cut of the profits. Also would be able to bump up those bids and if I won then we can cancel the auction since ya know we’re friends.

LOL! - but would you have them use your CGC account and show off the books on your business Instagram page?

[mosconi]

If CGC can gather the evidence that the store owner received monetary compensation from the millions of dollars of scam slabs over the years from Zanello, then the benefit of doubt will be out the window.  A documented money trail/money transfers from scammer to store owner would be a starting point to investigate.  I'm no skilled detective, but at this point we can only speculate what kind of financial shenanigans were going on between them 

Edited February 5 by mosconi

[sledgehammer]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:30 PM, Mdesimone said:

Yes I wouldn’t take the risk either as a shop, I would ask 2 of my friends to list books on eBay under their accounts and give them a cut of the profits. Also would be able to bump up those bids and if I won then we can cancel the auction since ya know we’re friends.

some people that joined the party, a little late, don't know that back on page 54, somebody noted that one of the feedback for the eBay scammer account, came from comic book station.

The poster innocently asked, if anybody was familiar with comic book station and asked if they might know the eBay scammer. a few days before that, I had noted that my suspicion was that this was probably a big submitter, that was using small feedback eBay accounts, to launder all the fraudulent books.

They also probably don't know that within days, that feedback became private and disappeared.

Edited February 5 by sledgehammer

[Telegan]

On 2/4/2024 at 5:20 PM, GDN said:

I remember.  

FWIW, Ryan addressed that in a subsequent video and gave his side of the story.  Believe him or not, I found his explanation genuine.

Ryan is correct that YT auto-deletes comments with links in them which as you can see from that linked post Comicwiz's comment on Ryan's YT video had.

I don't know Ryan personally and have never bought anything from him, but follow his YouTube channel as he's one of the few that focuses a lot on Golden Age comics.  Again, I don't know him personally, but of all the YouTube Channels I've watched, he seems to be the most genuine with no ulterior motives, and intent on trying to educate people as opposed to being a hype-monster.  I've seen him say don't buy certain higher-value comics because they may be overpriced when he himself owns them and it would benefit him for the prices to go up.  Most of his videos are full of information for collectors in terms of grading comics, what to watch out for when purchasing comics, following the latest Heritage auctions, etc. more than trying to hype up comics.

I haven't kept up with this thread, so I don't know what the deal is with the deleting of comments, but the YouTube algorithm is known to do auto-deletes of comments.  You can go to several videos as examples and may see displayed something like "8 comments" and you may only see 2, 3, 7, etc. comments.  The missing ones are the ones that were probably auto-deleted.  I've had this happen a few times on YouTube channels simply for including a URL (at least in most cases).  In one example, I kept re-submitting it, and it kept getting deleted, so I gave up.  The link was nothing more than "proof" of what I was saying in the comment because I usually like to show some type of evidence to back up my reasoning.  Other times the algorithm probably thought I was a bot because I was long-winded. 

[sledgehammer]

On 2/5/2024 at 5:34 PM, comicjel said:

LOL! - but would you have them use your CGC account and show off the books on your business Instagram page?

I understand what you're saying, but there haven't been any of the books, documented to have been swapped, on their business Instagram page.

The only books that have been documented on their Instagram or Facebook accounts, are books that were put on the list, that showed up on their accounts 4 to 5 years ago.

I find it incredibly hard to believe, that the AF 15, yellow label 6.5, on the list, was submitted for a custom label, by some goof, with a little fee going to the dealer. The scope of this is ridiculously beyond some goof, pulling the rug over the eyes of a guy with a dealer account.

[Nick Furious]

The middle ground between being in on the scam and being duped is "allowing yourself to be duped".  I wouldn't be surprised it turns out that the store owner was not in on it overtly, but also ignored his serious suspicions and allowed himself to be duped.  If he was getting significant financial benefit from the scam (consignment fees, etc.), it would be pretty easy to take a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding where all those valuable books came from.  

[comicjel]

On 2/5/2024 at 6:51 PM, sledgehammer said:

I understand what you're saying, but there haven't been any of the books, documented to have been swapped, on their business Instagram page.

The only books that have been documented on their Instagram or Facebook accounts, are books that were put on the list, that showed up on their accounts 4 to 5 years ago.

I find it incredibly hard to believe, that the AF 15, yellow label 6.5, on the list, was submitted for a custom label, by some goof, with a little fee going to the dealer. The scope of this is ridiculously beyond some goof, pulling the rug over the eyes of a guy with a dealer account.

You make a compelling case - it could be that CGC is working their way up!

I hope not for his family, but I guess we will find out eventually! 

[EastEnd1]

Here's the reference in the court filing to Comic Book Station.  They are not a litigant however.

[bc]

On 2/5/2024 at 7:59 PM, EastEnd1 said:

Here's the reference in the court filing to Comic Book Station.  They are not a litigant however.

They should be.

Granted them access back in 2016. Suit claims "more then 2000 comic books " Love to see the breakdown between submissions per account - that would tell the real story.

-bc