"I expect most people would describe that as "defending" certain price levels of cards, but I wouldn't expect that to be considered negative. However, if a group of collectors got together and were to engage in this sort of "defensive" bidding with the cards just changing hands between the group, I can certainly see how that would be viewed differently."
David - I think that defending a price is when someone is willing to bid on the card and at the right price win that said card or cards if their bid holds up. I don't think any collector has a problem when people legitimately bid and win cards.
The issue that this thread has brought to light is one that most have speculated has been going on, had strong evidence has been going on, and some have posted on message boards the last few years about. People started noticing irregularities with bids back in April/May last year with certain cards that were increasing in price for no apparent reason at an exponential rate - Clemente rookies, Koufax rookies, Rose rookies, a few Ryan rookies... Same bidder was bidding up the 7's and 8's but only in certain auction and with a certain seller. Care to connect the dots and figure out the seller in quesion and the person who has stated they were bidding them up in this thread are where this happened.
Anyone could have looked at the auction results on VCP I figured the a***t bidder was clueless when it came to bidding on cards. Would bid 15-20 times on the same card rather than a snipe at the end costing themselves a lot of money and always losing out on the card and being the underbidder; however, the easy tip off was that the same bidder had over 50+ retractions with the same seller. This person was not clueless about how to bid they were just clueless that nobody had figured out who was doing it, what they were doing, and a bunch of people knew who it was and why they were doing it.
This week's events are a good thing for the hobby in the long run. Those who do business the right way will continue to do so, and they will see their sales increase, pick up new customers, and the hobby will go on. I have no issues buying from the people I deal with and will only buy even more from them exclusively.
I also think that those who were ignorant enough to publicly out themselves and all of their dirty shenanigans will become no longer welcome in the hobby or lose business. Believe that happened a while back, and all the events of this week did was make it public and let the collecting community decide who they would not deal with going forward. Interesting part is all of the items being brought forth are going to be decided on with the help of some lawyers, maybe some federal bureaus looking into it... When you add the potential fraud, items being shipped across state lines, and the dollar amounts being discussed I think the delete button would have been a really good idea for some parties involved. They have now have made investigating this whole thing on both sides a whole lot easier.
