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.
Have any UF4 1st prints been mentioned as one the books he messed with? Just curious cause this guy going after very highly graded keys and we know UF4 a bunch have been graded.
This is gonna get very interesting cause there is no way there is only one cockroach… when there is big money involved plenty of scammers get involved.
Good thing is I’ve been sick the last 2 days (coughing) so I’ve been staying home and been up countless hours scouring the forums and youtubes to keep up to speed on this. If I find anything about UF4, I’ll let you know. The scammer has been probably been doing this since 2011 and his go to book is ASM 300, there are tons of them. If I owned a cgc graded 9.8 ASM 300 that I bought online I’d be very worried.
Last night the GoCollect site was bogged down because there were a rash of people going on the site presumably to look for evidence of other books that the scammer may have scammed or checking if their own books that they bought could be compromised.
In theory we gonna see much less sales of these kinds of books via BIN and no way a person who knows about this news will be comfortable bidding on high grade keys this guy dealt with.
So if you sent a high grade CGC to an auction house I would try to pause it from selling with less buyers confidence we might see some interesting auction prices
Terrible all around for the comic ecosystem
He is messing with many peoples money via grading… dealers…private flippers…auction houses… regular collectors trying to sell big books they held for years… etc…
. That broke me.
