[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by DeanH3

Unless you had that incontrovertible evidence, naming names would only get you into an argument. Those who are named would obviously deny the accusation and we'd go round and round. Jeff L. warned us of Mastro and he denied everything until he got busted by the Feds. Might make for an epic net54 thread though.

Not to hi-jack your thread as this might be a little off target, but pertains to card doctoring. I've wondered about the time line of progression of the sophistication of alterations. What kind of alterations were being done 20, 15, 10 years ago vs 5 years up to current techniques? Where alterations much "simpler" so to speaker 15 years ago which made them "easier" to detect? Could that mean earlier graded cards actually being less likely to have some kind of alteration due to the types of alterations being done at that time easier to detect? Could be a totally naive thought, but a thought popped into my head.

Dean others would know the answer better than I do. I suspect that since we're only talking about cardboard, this isn't an evolving science to any significant extent. The famous VCBC 7 article from 1996 quotes Dan Desmond as saying good alteration is undetectable, and even if that is not the case, I suspect part of the problem is that for your 8 or 15 or 25 dollar fee you aren't buying a crime lab, you are buying a quick look. I think the TPGs are very good for the most part at what they do, but with a number of motivated and capable card doctors, and not much time or technology to review, and human error, you are going to get your fair share of altered cards that get through the process, even if you don't buy a more nefarious theory of TPG.

PS One reason the very early grades might be more reliable even if more lax numerically is that there were so many more raw cards to send in for the first time. So many submissions now are stuff being recycled. But again I don't really know.