Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
To put some legal context on this, selling an item in interstate commerce knowing a material fact has been misrepresented or omitted certainly can be mail fraud and/or wire fraud. Travis' point, essentially, is that we have reached the point where the fact that a slabbed card is trimmed is no longer material. Incredibly, and sadly, he may be right. The flip is the commodity and the slab sanitizes.
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This is fair, but I think of the slabbed card as "laundered money" in this context.
If an auction house has no reason to suspect that the consignor is laundering trimmed cards through a third-party grader, then I wouldn't hold the auction house accountable.
If an auction house is doing business with a known trimmer, we're getting into an ethical gray area, but there's too much uncertainty to hold the auction house accountable for individual listings.
If an auction house is knowingly taking trimmed cards that were slabbed as unaltered, then they're essentially just fencing fraudulent goods.
I don't think the slabs make trimming an immaterial fact; I think they just make it much harder to detect. I still think it's worthwhile to identify altered cards when possible and to pass that information along to consumers. We're probably just talking past each other, but Travis' "hobby clowns" reference gave me the impression that he sees Probstein and others as the real victims now that they've successfully flooded the market with secretly altered cards, and that left a bad taste in my mouth.