The problem with this is that some innocent buyer may have resold these or other slabs in the past without knowing the scam took place. So now there’s question of how many actual fakes are there in the wild that people don’t know about.
Edit: Holy shit! some user using WorthPoint to track sales historical records back to the beginning has found the scammer has had over 1200 listings dating back to 2011 with hundreds and hundreds of high priced cgc books, tons of ASM 300!
1200 listings wowsa! Seller had one heck of a long run… amazing it took this long to catch his scam.
During bear markets that’s when scams get exposed… ala Madoff during financial crisis.
You know more details will emerge… but he dealt with big books so now the high end market buyers will be cautious… How will auction houses deal with this? Ebay? etc… 1200 listings that we just heard about what if he went to local cons or NYCC cause last I saw he was from NY heck what if he was trading or sold books to local NY comic shops also… lots to think about.
CGC gonna be busy this Holiday season and not in a good way
Perhaps a grading service on the comic grading services is coming up next
Reading through the CBCS thread…thinking CGC may not acknowledge this one.
But I think if it’s one seller there’s got to be a way to identify every slab this person was provided a rehokder. So CGC could have a list of slab ID’s that should someone contact them they could pretty quickly determine if it’s on the list.
That would be the right thing to do, maybe even flag the books when you look up the number on their website.
The thread on the cgc board has been there since Sunday and as of now there hasn’t been an official response from cgc despite some very serious accusations from their users that a cgc employee could be complicit in the scam, as there were private messages uncovered that the scammer said he had connections inside cgc that would do him “favors”.
So yeah, I don’t think cgc is going to do anything and will just hope this all blows over and goes away.
As I’m typing this a user there just uncovered a 3rd Hulk 181 that was swapped. In fact this Hulk 181 was moved 15 times this past 2 years. It’s getting weirder and weirder.
Can’t stop reading. Been jumping back and forth between the cgc and cbcs forums. Big shootout to the guys in the cgc forum, some of them are funny as shit. A user suggested that cgc put tamper proof stickers on the cgc slabs like the ones they have on electronics and medicine bottles. Someone responded that cgc can’t be trusted to put the stickers on the right place or on the slab at all based on their history of quality control . That broke me.
I’m sure if they put tamper proof stickers on, they’ll get damaged or fall off during shipment
Those boxes they ship in don’t protect a hunk of U.S. Steel
You gotta give Ryan from Automatic Comics some big props his digging around and finding these examples of what is going on.
And yes I do agree with him CGC needs to have a database search to see if you own any books that came from this seller… but we know this not gonna happen…
“The comic market is so dependent on grading companies; so much money is tied up and spent on CGC/CBCS slabs, that if one company fails, the market would collapse.”
Did you notice everyone of the items were auctions to ensure they would sell. Also Shouldnt CGC have figured something out if the seller kept on submitting so many high end books to be reholdered?
This affects everyone here, it’s not just the mega grails that we have to worry about. We now need to now question how many others knew about this reholder exploit and were sending other easily attainable keys like Strange Academy 1 and other ratio variants? Sure the money wouldn’t be as much as doing this scam on mega keys but what I have learned is that when scammers find a way to make a buck they would do it.
There’s also the fact that for many years cgc never distinguished direct and newsstands on their labels. People are now uncovering that the scammer was swapping lower grade newsstands into a cgc 9.8 direct case and asking for a reholder with the newsstand label making it worth many times more than the direct edition. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I promise I’m not being purposefully obtuse, but how does if affect other stuff like a Strange Academy book as you mentioned?
If I’m buying a copy of Strange Academy #1 (variant or otherwise) how would someone pull this scam and/or what is the incentive in doing so. I mean, I can see the book is Strange Academy #1? That’s different than book like a Mark Jewelers where I have to take the CGC word that there is, indeed a mark jewelers insert that I can’t see.
Maybe I’m not comprehending the scam correctly.
Now if we are at the point that someone is taping the front and back cover of a Strange Academy #1 to the guts of another book and getting that graded (which makes no sense at all to me)…sure…that’s a problem.
Walk this old guy through this as to why I’m needing to worry about other types of book as long as I can see the book in the slab and be observant for visual issues (buy the book–not the grade)?
There’s lots to unpack here. I want to say upfront this is all speculation from the community at this point but we do know that it’s happening with some major grails, the evidence is indisputable.
Some members on the cgc forums have suggested that a scammer could theoretically take any key (say in our example Strange Academy 1 or any key in the $300-500 range), buy a legit cgc 9.8.
crack the case and send the book to get regraded again
assuming it comes back as a 9.8 again you now have a new cgc 9.8 case with a new cert number
do this say 100 times and you have 100 new 9.8 cases with all different cert numbers
buy up all cgc 9.2-9.4 of said key which you can get for much cheaper and in some cases get them at case cost, or even just buy the raws
crack the cgc 9.8 case and slip in the lesser graded book
send this in to get reholdered
members in the forum have asked around if sending in books to get reholdered will go through a new grading process and the members there are unsure, we don’t know how the reholdering process from cgc works
so if it gets reholdered in a new case with the cgc 9.8 label with same cert number then the scam is completed.
we know this has at least happened in the past with bigger keys because (again in the thread) books have been discovered with the same cert number but clearly 2 different books (ie spine roll, multiple ticks etc)
It now comes into question how many of these cgc graded 9.8s that people in the past complained about that had multiple spine ticks were a result of this scam. Hope this makes sense, my head is spinning trying to unravel what I’ve been reading.
Why would this fella waste time trying to scam with CBCs books when CGC gets more money?
. That broke me.
