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Dan Mathewson...is someone who takes an old magazine or newspaper, which he buys for $5 or $10 at a garage sale or finds in his attic, then takes out hsi trusty exacto and starts carving photos out of it. He then has them slabbed and calls them authentic "Spaulding" or "Whitman" cards. The names come from the photographer or the periodical, whatever sounds best.
If the dude can't find a company to slab them, though, or he thinks they charge him too much, what's better than to make your own slabbing company, and name it after a car association, like AAA (or whatever else you come up with...)
And then, start grading and slabbing your own work.
This seller lives about two blocks away from AAA in Honolulu. Coincidence? More than coincidence. What if someone calls the AAA Grading phone number from their website and asks for this guy by name...and...voila! The response is "he's not in right now, but should be in this afternoon..." Well well well. You now have the seller of these slabbed items under all these different usernames working in the grading company office which slabs them.
Where I take severe issue with the particular auction sites (like eBay) is this: these are not cards, but they always appear under the collectibles/sports cards/graded (or ungraded) categories. These are not cards. They are worthless photos cut out of magazine pages being foisted onto not-so-educated people in the arena. When I first got onto eBay and knew very little about this, I bought one of these pieces of shaat -- a 1911 Pictoral News C Mathewson Ad Card. NASA Grade 10 (HM). Gladly, I only paid $12.00 for it. All it does is look neat, because it happens to be a neat pose of Christy. It is otherwise worthless. A lesson learned...
I have to be a happy, though...in looking for this garbage in Yahoo Auctions today, i did find a 1909 Matty Domino Disk which appeared by the scan to be in NM-MT condition. I don't have one yet. It's BIN price was only $96.00. So, I jumped on that and snagged it. Made my day... 