Sometime in the mid to late ‘90’s (I forget exactly when) Alan Rosen, aka Mr. Mint, used to proudly sell a magical potion guaranteed to remove all stains from cards. He openly sold it at card shows. I never bought any but wish I did because ever since I’ve wondered if it worked.

Word! Worst interviewer I have ever tried to listen to. Cringe worthy as it seemed like he was interviewing himself. I am guessing when that was over Bill said to himself that doing 20 months in a Fed Pen was easier.

Well whoever you're talking about, at least he has the common decency to address the other side directly. That's something for you both to learn.

I really have no idea where you are going with this and why you decided to focus on me. My comment that you first replied to, once again, was directed to snowman who has his defined repeatedly what cleaning a card is to him. I merely asked him if he has no issues with it then why not disclose it on the graded cards he sells.

You have taken my comment to him out of context for some inexplicable reason and are attempting to turn it into a slippery slope discussion...maybe for the amusement of section103 and his wife but really there is no slippery slope here. Sorry to disappoint but you get an A for effort.

I had no crystal ball or special insight or inside information. I did think, given what I knew, that something would come of it. And I certainly hoped it would. I don't know exactly what happened, but I am sure that the issue was not the lack of a viable legal theory. That part of it was easy.

If I could tell the course of future events, I'd have even more cards and they'd be stored on my private island. What we can reasonably do though is not completely lie about the past just because those lies would be convenient to our agenda of justifying criminal fraud if they were true or believed.

I can't wait for these numerous hobby lawyers to be identified. Any minute now.

If I am not mistaken, the lawyers to which snowman has referred, graduated from the same law school that he did.

Out of all of Travis's hotly contested takes in the thread, this is the one that gives me most concern.

How Many altered cards been slabbed
 

I brought and sold a Ty Cobb graded 3.5 due to the fact the card had 4 smashed corners, done on purpose or was strewed down tight in a holder, the problem I found later was very obvious using a Black Light-the card was overall nice, but I didn't want it---its issue showed strong on the reverse--you might want to check yours--if it doesn't brother you, that's okay, but the card was not for me--

Brian Gray will always tell what he thinks at any point in time. If you really listen to Brian, you will get a pulse of what is happening at that point in time. And Brian does bring a very original perspective as he has owned and managed stores/been a distributor/owned and ran a card company/been a show dealer and even been a collector. That's quite the breadth of experience.

On this point (and this point specifically) I agree with Travis.

Rich

I am assuming that the change in PSA's language was / is a direct result of Kurt's products, but can anyone confirm that?

Can it also be confirmed that only one (what I first heard) of Kurt's subs was invalidated by PSA? Or did they blackball him completely?

What was the issue with the card that made you not want it? And why would anyone smash the corners on purpose?

Darn, of all the times to be on vacation, I missed all the fun. My favorite topic! :) Peter, thanks for referencing the post from last year.

Yes Peter, you can charge someone with whatever the hell charges you want in an indictment. Obviously, some threshold has to be met, but just because something is listed on an indictment doesn't mean they are guilty of said charges. Hence in a trial, the jury gives verdicts for each charge.

One of my favorite quotes "You could indict a ham sandwich".

How about your garden variety card, let's just arbitrarily say a 1956 Mantle PSA 6. Let's say I have two very similar examples. Both are trimmed, but it isn't obvious to most. I sell one with no disclosure. I sell the other in the same venue, but disclose prominently that I lightly trimmed it. Same price?


Sadly, as long as they are in slabs, I think a large percentage of buyers wouldn't care.

Lastly, I thoroughly enjoyed the interview and would recommend watching it in its entirety.

I personally couldn’t get through an hour.

I hate to admit it, but CGC's stance on cleaning seems to be reasonably workable and thus good. Removing "stuff" from comics isn't considered restoration by CGC. But!!! Introducing any extraneous substance/material, even water, to a comic is considered restoration and CGC will bestow the dreaded Purple label indicative of "Restored" upon the comic if it detects that any such extraneous substances have been applied.

Therefore rubbing sugar, gum and wax stains or wiping bird droppings off a card is not considered restoration, but a card on which Alan Rosen's "magic potion" had been used would definitely be considered restored, i.e. altered in card terminology.

:)

+1

Exactly how i feel. I tried but had to skip to the 1:06 mark . Made me want to edit the soda drinker out.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Every 200 posts there must be a card; Read the damn rules , lawyers !
 

http://imagehost.vendio.com/a/204295...3WORCH_NEW.JPG

..

And this makes sense. It's acceptable to remove a foreign substance from a card without disclosure, as long as nothing foreign (i.e. chemicals, water) is added to the card in the process. So "cleaning" per se, is not really the issue.

As someone who grew up in the 90s and had a small understanding of the events that took place, it was an interesting listen (whether he was telling the truth or not).

Do I think anything different of Bill Mastro? No. He still was a terrible person in the hobby (in my opinion).

Kudos for Brian to have an interview with him, but the way he was fan boying the whole time in the interview drove me nuts. He is not a good interviewer. His personality of "I need to constantly talk and express my opinion" does not fit for an interviewer. But I can see why Bill took the interview, because Brian basically kissed the ground he walked on for two hours.

One other little thing that really bugged me was every time Brian took a sip of his drink, he licked in lips with a lot of emphasis. Drove me nuts.

Eric B.

How do you remove stuff from comics without using water or chemicals?

Eraser, brush, etc. See comic book dry cleaning.

But the usage of any solvents should get you the dreaded Purple label from CGC if the graders were of course on the ball that day.

;)

Hmmm ... not my field, but my vague understanding was that much more restoration/cleaning was acceptable in comics than in cards. Your thoughts on that?

An interesting and now very controversial question. For 25+ years the definite guide to restoration procedures could be found in the annual Overstreet Price Guide. Then CGC came around in 2000 and unbeknown to all but a few dealers close to CGC, their definition of restoration did not include all the procedures included in Overstreet's guide to restoration. Most contentious was pressing.

As a result, those dealers close to CGC had comics cleaned and pressed and got Blue(unrestored) labels for the comics they'd submitted to CGC. But buyers of these early slabs were under the impression that the comics contained were unrestored under Overstreet's previous guidelines to comic restoration. This of course gave those dealers who were close to CGC a tremendous and very unfair advantage in the marketplace.

Nonetheless, CGC classifies trimming as well as cleaning with solvents as restoration and in particular notes any trimming detected on the label (or so I understand).

What's also interesting is stamp collecting started way back in the 1840's which is far earlier than trade card or comic collecting. Are there any stamp collectors on this board who can tell us what can be done to stamps without raising hackles/alarm bells?

:confused:

I've always found it odd to compare restoration in the fine art world to restoration of baseball cards. The two are incomprable. A one of a kind painting being restored and preserved is not even remotely similar to a mass produced baseball card where the market places a value difference between cards of different conditions. It's literally the condition that gives the card its value, relative to other copies of the same card. So no, it's nothing like restoring a one of a kind painting.

The better analogy would be the ephemera market. A movie poster, or advertisement that was mass produced. Altering and restoring those things will decrease the value compared to a similarly conditioned untouched copy. Or if you insist on fine art, a statue cast from a mold, where hundreds of copies exist. If Remington's famous Broncho Buster statue had the cowboy's arm broken off and glued back on, take a guess of it's value compared to an unrestored version.

An even simpler difference -- baseball card restoration is done to deceive, art restoration is done with disclosure to enhance people's experience.

LOL just recalling the Brent Huigens nonsense about "conservation."

While that's true, you need to consider why there needs to be deception in cards, but not paintings. If alterations didn’t matter in cards, it wouldn't be information that is withheld. The reason it matters in cards is what I pointed out above: original survivor cards are differeiated from other mass-produced copies based on condition. You don't have that market dynamic with unique paintings.

This is the central question nobody has ever answered satisfactorily -- not Brent, not Travis, not anyone else -- if people don't care and it won't affect price, why don't you just disclose it? Ask it and watch the BS start to flow.

Don't be silly, Peter. They don't disclose it because there is nothing to disclose, not because it would negatively impact the price. Honesty is kept out of the equation for other reasons.

There are days I'm pretty pessimistic and have come close to abandoning this thinking, but overall, I think at least some substantial part of the hobby still views most stuff done to cards as something they would want to know about.

And yes, it's a slippery slope, and there's no perfect definition of what is material alteration and what isn't that will satisfy everyone, I get that. But that doesn't invalidate the overarching point. I can have a valid general principle even if I can't perfectly and consistently apply it in every case. And anyhow, disclosure is the perfect solution, let people decide for themselves if they care.

We know for a fact that a substantial part of the hobby cares - which is exactly why our fraudsters are so hellbent on not disclosing it. These crooks wouldn't make as much money if they were honest about the altering, it is the only motive to cover it up and hide it when selling. But of course, this too must be lied about in order to come up with a narrative that justifies their fraud.

If snowball actually believes it doesn't matter he'd have no problem proving his assertion by keeping a very public record of sales for a substantial period of time, disclosing his cleaning clearly for one copy of each card and withholding for the other. I'm sure he's got enough doubles to make a reasonable sample size. But somehow, I doubt he'd do it. It's better to just argue it won't matter than risk being proven wrong. It helps justify his fraud in his own mind. There must be a conscience in there after all. ;)

I definitely vote for your disclosure requirement.

At the same time, a couple of cautionary tales come to mind, where disclosure has become meaningless:

1) In the great state of CA, there are disclosures on just about everything about how it may cause cancer. They've grown so ubiquitous that they're meaningless. I could see a situation where just about every card includes some throwaway disclosure like, "This card may have been altered by a previous owner." Obviously, once it's everywhere, it starts to lose its potency, and buyers would probably no longer care.

2) As one of my accounting professors used to say, "If you want to hide something in your financial statements, put it in the footnotes, because no one ever reads them." While it's not a thing today, it's not inconceivable to have a long list of boilerplate for every item at auction. If the boilerplate is long enough, you could disclose just about anything in there, and no one would ever read it.

Just to be clear, I don't condone card doctoring. I don't doctor cards myself (except in industry-approved fashion, like trimming down a card that is intended to be hand cut, like a 71 Bazooka). And I do support disclosure of any work done to a card, because knowing is half the battle.

But sometimes I do like to poke the bear. And in this case, I do worry that disclosure might not lead to the outcomes we might hope to accomplish.

I think you're overcomplicating it. It's not going to bury collectors to add one line to an auction, I used Kurt's Card Care to clean some residue off this card, or, this card was stained and I used X to remove it.

It takes me about 1 second to write "card is trimmed". It should take less than 1 second for the buyer to read that.

Honest disclosure is very, very easy and uncomplicated. The reasons people try to come up with to justify not telling the truth are usually pretty funny though.

Fair enough. Just trying to think through this a bit more to consider whether there are unintended consequences to going there. I probably am overthinking it, which is standard for me.

Naturally, as much as we're in favor of disclosure, I don't see any rush by sellers to go there. Obviously (at least to my knowledge) there's nothing to disclose with the stuff that I'm selling. Conversely, the people who know they have stuff to disclose are the least motivated and least likely to disclose it, for all the obvious reasons.

Right. We're talking about disclosing known alterations, not some bullshit list of risk factors.

I can't wait for the next dozen or so 'I'm not a scammer but here's why taking less than 5 seconds to just tell the truth might actually be bad' takes. I've settled into 25% disgust and 75% amusement at this crap we get anytime someones suggests just telling the honest truth. I have never experienced people having an issue with the concept of just telling the honest truth in any of my other hobbies.

Figures this topic would bring 237 posts in 5 days.

THAT is exactly what Snowman wrote the last time he got rung up on this topic. Very convenient stance.

The major difference is that pressing is allowed, and even performed, by CGC, but the rules on cleaning are actually pretty similar.

That's a semi contentious area there too.
Especially after grading came along.

The answer will vary depending on the issue.
One set from Germany had acidic gum, and it's expected and almost required that it be removed by soaking.
For a long time unused US stamps that were precancelled for bulk mailers were not allowed to be sold to collectors, but of course were sold by a few different places, the minimum required to be a permit holder for a smaller town was an expected 500 mail pieces.
Most of the dealers could get their hands on thousands at a time, and soaked the gum off to sort of cover up their purchases.

Most yellow or orange stamps oxidize to orange or brown, and a lot of people will reverse this by a quick dip in hydrogen peroxide. I don't, most of the stamps it happens to are inexpensive, and nice ones are easily found.

Things like extra long bits between perforations and routinely shortened, doing that by pulling with a tweezers is generally ok, cutting with an exacto knife isn't. Again, if something is the minimum catalog value of 25 cents like nearly every stamp since the 30's it isn't usually done.

For used stamps, soaking to remove paper and envelope bits is generally ok , In some cases the piece it's on and the cancel showing can be worth a lot more than the stamp so caution is needed.
A stamp with a lot of dirt also often gets soaked.

The grading companies do give very high grades to stamps issued without perforations cut from blocks so you get a stamp with eight others showing in the margins, I don't think that's at all good, but it seems to have become mostly ok. Sort of like trimming a hand cut card like Hostess.


Anything else does happen, and is NOT ok. The degree varies as does how it affects the price.

Removing the perforated border,
adding a perforated border
repairing tears
Painting in details a stamp never had so it seems like a more expensive version.
Fixing thin spots
washing out cancels
adding fake cancels
Faking overprints
Obscuring overprints
Chemically altering the color
rebuilding or adding back damaged areas
Putting on new gum
redistributing the original gum

The expertizers are very good at catching that stuff, and are typically experts in a fairly narrow field.

All that can lead to interesting situations.
Here's a stamp I sent in via a friend.
The first foreign entry of it's kind to be expertized.
But with a fake cancel.
At some point, a used O6 was an easier thing to sell, or higher priced than one that was unused with no gum.
I only know of 6-7 examples of that foreign entry.

Rare, but a bit messed up.
https://www.net54baseball.com/pictur...ictureid=25804

Forgive my ignorance (I haven't submitted anything for grading in years), but do the grading companies ask that you disclose known alterations? Is there a question on the submission form about this? Does the form (or the terms and conditions of submission) state that there is an "obligation to disclose"? If it doesn't, maybe it should. Because if there isn't a spelled-out obligation to disclose, then there may not be an affirmative obligation to do so, which leaves it up to the grading companies to discern the alteration. Legally, anyway. Ethically, of course, I would think a submitter should disclose what they know.

I guess you missed this thread, where PSA changed their terms for submitters.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=353374

How many people in the history of PSA have submitted cards noting the alterations they had made?

I actually know one guy that sent in a counterfeit card with details describing the exact differences between it and a real card. It came back from PSA in a 9 slab graded as a real card. It is a longtime friend and fellow member who posted about it on here when it happened.

I know this is slightly off topic but germane to a degree. I submitted a card to SGC a while back. I had this card since the year it was published. I got it in a trade from a friend. No ill intentions on either side of the trade.

Fast forward to a few years ago. I submit it to SGC, it comes back ungraded, signs of trimming.....WTF??? No, not from either of us?? So, I submitted I card I understood to be right from the pack, I had no reason to believe otherwise. No one was going graded-slabbed crazy when I made that trade. So, I doubt highly that it was trimmed much less considered by the friend of mine.

Well now, screw that. I'm done.....

Raw is all, graded is jaded.

Butch.

PSA and grading were all about money and nothing about the hobby from the get-go. Yet people still give them business and clamor for even one grade more.

People buying commons for 1,000's just to participate in the pecker contest known as the registry are the biggest marks ever. Yeah, they may make money and have bragging rights, but the original graders must be laughing their asses off somewhere.

I know I have done my part as I have freed 1500+ from their plastic prisons, even some big boys. If more would do that, the pop reports would become even more meaningless and inaccurate.

But, why are you buying graded just to crack them out? If you don’t like graded cards, why not just buy raw?

I’ve cracked a couple thousand or so. For me, it’s because the card might not be available raw. In my little realm I might have to wait a few years or just never get a card if I’m picky about the container it ships in. Most people grade the decent stuff, so a lot of my scarcer material was put into my collection via cracking the slab open. If I’m looking for a poor grade T206 Mathewson, I’ll just get a raw one, but if I want a card that has ~10 copies known, it doesn’t make sense to be picky. Buy it and crack it.