No! Say it ain't so!


Anyone remember the "sale" of the signed psa 5 Mantle psa reported....long before the run up for 275k? Literally was 10x the last sale and it had to be "noted" somewhere

Sportscards are an asset. People tend to talk about the details of their assets' value sometimes.

The world isn't going to cater to your preferences. Here or elsewhere. Not to mention that a large portion of the threads don't touch that topic here anyway.

If you don't like the concept, just ignore the ones that do

That outlier sale actually was a real transaction; the owner has the #1 signed Mantle Registry set. He is very wealthy and felt it was worth the money so he splurged for a piece he wanted. Man, I wish that sale never happened, let alone several of the sales afterward; that domino chain cost me a bundle collecting that stuff. The 4 card/9 auto that sold at Heritage a little ways back was also legit as a very respected member here and on SCT won it. A member here also won the Heritage signed 52b that went 69k. Sometimes an explosion is like the 1925 Gehrig; they’re cheap until they suddenly ain’t, and then they stay that way as the hobby accepts the new valuation/price point.

No, just the wrong thread. There's plenty of what you want on the board, just don't annoy yourself by opening threads you don't want to see.

To be fair, this is a thread about a major scandal in the hobby involving PWCC, ebay, and shill bidding. I'm not sure why you would expect to see something different in this thread. There is no shortage of other great threads discussing some awesome vintage cards and collections here as well, both for high value and low value cards.

Nobody took advantage of me. I wasn't shill bid on this card. I made an offer for less than what I felt the card was worth to me. The seller accepted my offer. I love the card and am more than happy with the price I paid. Feel free to berate me ale my purchasing decisions though if you dislike me. I don't mind.

Oh it was, but it kind of BEGS U to ask why he needed that sale recorded. Just glad I didnt sell him mine, as it was about 1/20 the cost of that (now a) 5.5. Course now it looks like a bargain.

Ive found most people that are "very wealthy" dont want people to know it, and hardly show it off.



Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

To paraphrase Dylan from Desolation Row

Somebody says, you're in the wrong thread, my friend
You'd better leave

I see what u did there, my friend! ;) Big fan of your example. Has great overall eye appeal. I know this is more for PM but did you ever get background on who had it signed? Looks like it has a great story behind it.

I did not, it was an (in person) ebay purchased from an ebay purchase in 2009 from power.buyer1

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no. I actually think the example posted looks like a lot of marquee cards over that same period. Shilling is clearly a problem, but the example posted just looked like normal activity to me.

Even if they were able to succeed in doing this for x number of cards (and I fully acknowledge that this does in fact occur), it's still artificial demand and economic theory tells us that the market will adjust. The market as a whole, or even sub segments of it, is just far too big for it to be manipulated by a handful or even hundreds of transactions. Do people get scammed? Yes, for sure. Daily. But the broader market stabilizes to meet supply and demand.

If you look at 2016, it seemed there was a price umbrella effect from the cards that were clearly manipulated resulting in increases across a wider spectrum of cards. Whether ultimately the market adjusts really doesn't lessen the pernicious effect of manipulation, especially in a market where information is so critical and where FOMO, maybe more than in other markets, is huge.

Peter, please help my fading memory from one of my favorite Dylan song:-

"Mama is in the factory making shoes
Daddy is in the alley looking for booze
And I'm in the kitchen with the tombstone blues."

Tombstone Blues. :)

From Highway 61 revisited.

Do you routinely sell cards you bought at 50% of what you paid? If this is normal activity to you, post your buys on here. I am sure there are members here who would save you fees at take them off your hands at half what you just paid.

If the first sale of the Mayweather was real, and the buyer consigned it back to PWCC, then assuming a 10 percent fee on the second sale, the buyer lost close to 60 percent. Nothing unusual to see though.

The market for even the highest traded cards is miniscule. The PSA 10 Jordan trades what 50 times a year and there are multiple guys with 10+ of them.

Wake me up when a popular card trades more then a thousand times per day. Of course hundreds of transactions can manipulate a card price when that card only trades a thousand times per year.

I’m not an investor or trader, so no. But the market is dominated by those types so who knows. I did not realize it was the same seller, so perhaps it is fake shilling. But I do know that every jordan card dropped 50% over the same period

Yup, super wrong in my eyes as a collector seeing someone called out like you've been for what you paid for a piece of cardboard.
It's a beautiful Mantle I hope you enjoy as long as you hold on to it, and the price you paid is for you to be comfortable with and only you.

I find your line of thinking interesting, though perhaps you're underplaying/undervaluing the effect of pump and dump.....
It's not just the 'outlier' high price paid for a shilled item that can falsely alter market value for a collectable, but the effect of todays sports forums online and on social media which pile on to the event.
When collectors discuss/post their feelings, both positive and negative, but often with a sense of excitement about that result, it fuels many buyers into that FOMO anxiety.
So without being completely sure themselves, a buyer who doesn't own a copy of a card they really desire may move out of their comfort zone purely because that FOMO suggests the opportunity may permanently disappear from their affordability or manageability.

Only takes 2 or 3 bidders each time, and the ones who are underbidders form the floor at the next auction and tend to bid to AT LEAST where they were on the losing auction, sometimes a little over.
Now further collector eyes see multiple auctions reaching a 'new' seemingly authentic bidder level and it resolves in their minds whether the original result was fairly achieved.

I understand your overall point, and that is that regardless of the above if collectors are willing to pay a new and inflated price, or fall away after a couple of auctions and the item finds once again it's previous selling point, the collectable is finding a longer term number that is considered it's value.

Fair in the way it gets there?
Probs not. But same thing happens in property and other assets, and if your pockets are deep enough it only really matters what YOU are willing to pay.
You see actors and famous people all the time selling uber expensive property they bought top of market for millions less than they paid, and I rarely feel sorry for them.
I own cards I've similarly paid up big time for, especially some modern stuff like Mahomes, and if it falls in to a pit I just accept I was the idiot willing to risk funds for a speculative piece of cardboard.

The anger pointed at your posts are unwarranted IMO, presuming you are not acting in bad faith at the behest of the bad actors.
No reason as I read it to believe that, so feel free to intellectualize as much as you like I say.:D

While I realize, or at least assume, you're being facetious, I think you've hit on the disconnect. It really is nothing unusual to see here. This stuff happens all the time. You really don't think there are people out there who bought high and them panic sell when the market is crashing? Lol. Come on. Normally I'd think someone was joking with a comment like that, but reading through this thread, I don't think you guys are joking. It happens constantly in the crypto community. Every time bitcoin falls, some sizeable percentage of people panic sell. It's actually one of causes of steep declines and added volatility. The sports card market is no different. People buy high and sell low every day on eBay. Particularly the flippers. Just go check out Instagram and Podcasters and the YouTube community of all these "investors" and "flippers". It's also when I do most of my buying. When the market "crashed" after the Feb/Mar peaks, I started buying like crazy because so many people were panic selling.

Also worth pointing out is what card this is. It's a Floyd Mayweather PSA 9 RC. This is the practically the poster child card of the Gen Z flippers/investors/crypto enthusiast type. Alternative sports like boxing, wrestling, tennis, soccer, etc are all the rage with these guys now. And so is keeping their "investments" in a PWCC vault. And they go after the GOATS. This is precisely the type of card I would expect someone like this to buy. I wouldn't even be surprised if the person who paid 11k for that card in Feb at the absolute peak of the market and then panic sold it just 2 months later probably has never even seen a Mayweather fight before in his life.

If you think this is abnormal buying and selling behavior, you're simply just out of touch with a pretty significant faction of the market. This truly is "nothing to see here" activity.

Whatever Travis. Defend away. You could spin a bullet hole through the head I am sure into some ordinary ho hum thing. Talk to me when he's indicted, for now I'm done with this.

I've read this thread top to bottom and I don't see Travis defending anybody.

He's being logical (as opposed to the pitchfork wielding mob who considers anything other than vilifying PWCC to be sheer heresy.)

Where were all the underbidder from just 2 months earlier ?


Keep trying

I'm not defending PWCC or Brent. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to see him indicted for shady behavior some day. I'm simply pointing out that these Mayweather card sales are not abnormal buying and selling behavior. If you want to find a zinger that's going to catch this guy, this isn't it.

I have no idea what this means. But I've already explained, in great detail, why these transactions are not indicative of abnormal buying and selling behavior. If you choose to ignore that information that's fine with me. We can just agree to disagree. I'm not going to "keep trying".

I have read through a few pages of this thread but not all. In the past what concerned me about PWCC was the trimmed graded cards that were making their way through PWCCs auctions. I told myself to avoid them or at least be extremely careful bidding on their auctions. I can also see how shill bidding had occurred, without or without their knowledge. Looking back on my wins in the last two years, only one or two have been in their auctions and because of the relatively low dollar amount, I am not concerned. With them moving off Ebay, I most likely will not follow. I would not be comfortable bidding on their auctions in cards worth more than a couple hundred dollars.

Sorry If I was a little harsh. It's just that IMHO, you are defending Brent Mastro, just by doing business with the know criminal. I actually feel sorry that he shill bidded the trimmed card up your Tuchas (took/us). I have a few cards in that range and I would never trust a known criminal or line their companies pockets with that kind of money. I actually try to stand for something.

I'd have a lawyer by now and trying to get my money back from him and let him ream someone else with his fish stories. I wish you all the best and again, my personal apologies for the tough love. Good luck and enjoy your collection anyway you'd like.

Akin to the people who would justified bidding on authentic stuff in Coaches Corner auctions (The auctions did have some minor JSA/PSA certed items). Irrelevant to that they were able to avoid fake items, their purchases helped keep Coaches Corner in business.

There are prominent, frequent posters here who rip PSA a new one every couple of days, who also sell higher-graded cards in PSA slabs.

(Why? Because PSA slabbed cards fetch more money.)

347. Kvetch-22
The principle that the people who bitterly complain the most about PSA’s horrific business practices are the same ones who gladly keep sending in more cards to be graded, because PSA slabs deliver the highest sales prices.

See also: “Hegemony Crickets!” - an expression referring to the metaphorical sound of silence as the venerated PSA refuses to ever address even a single one of the countless accusations of malfeasance made against them.

Thanks, and no worries. No offense taken. When I made my offer on the Mantle, it was made with the assumption that it had been altered in some way, whether that was from micro trimming or recoloring or card stock manipulation or whatever. It doesn't bother me. I care more about eye appeal and authenticity. In my eyes, it allowed me to get a 52 Mantle with the eye appeal of a 7 for the price of a nice 3. But I fully recognize that to many collectors, it is borderline worthless because they don't want altered cards in their collection. I can respect that viewpoint, I just don't share it. I personally love the card.

lol

My question now is how can ANYONE trust ANYTHING that PSA has graded? It's like all of those old DiMaggio/Williams/Mantle autographs of which 90% were forged. How can you really know which from the 10% were the real ones.

Until you get the property tax bill....

Or as my NH friends once put it "live, Freeze and Die"

Interesting video with a PWCC rep answering questions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3EXLzyk4fg

Has Brent made an official statement about the Ebay/PWCC split?

The first boxing cards were issued in 1862, so I would hardly classify it as a new kid on the block.

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...enan%20CDV.jpg

Wish it was all the rage with the new breed; I'd sell my collection into the rise and pay off my mortgage(s).

What is truly amazing to me (and please ignore if someone already pointed this out) is that a search for PWCC shows TONS of sellers using "PWCC-E" and the like in their titles. I can't believe they are getting away with that.

Thanks I watched This One Above

If the slabs have the PWCC-E sticker on the back, then that's pretty standard practice. Same with the MBA gold stickers. People usually mention those in the title. If they don't have the sticker though, then ya, that's false advertising obviously.

Watched the You Tube video. That PWCC rep is such a sanctimonious sack of dung. You'd think PWCC never did anything suspect.

Who are the other two people besides the pwcc employee ?

2 Sports Cards bloggers I've never heard of.

I think I mis-understood what they were doing. If it's just that they bought cards with those stickers, no big thing. I thought they were using PWCC in title as click bait.

In that video the Pwcc guy said we get 5-10% higher sales because of scans, packing, and shipping methods.

Uh huh....yea right.....I am a small time seller and I do all three of those equally, if not better than, PWCC.

There are many reasons why a company like PWCC would produce higher sales prices than other sellers. This stuff isn't rocket science.

I would probably rank order the reasons for higher sale prices as follows, with #1, without question, being the primary factor that would explain the majority of the differences we see in sales prices vs the rest of the market.

1. #1 - The number of followers that they had far exceeds that of nearly every other eBay seller in this market. The more eyes you have on your auctions, the more they will sell for. This should be obvious to everyone.

1. #2 - They have better images of their cards than every single other seller, full stop. Nobody else offers high-definition scans that allow you to zoom in on a card at 20x magnification enabling you to see the individual paper fibers on a card. You can see exactly what you're bidding on. With so many other sellers, you often can't see a card's flaws. Blurry images, low-def scans, front-only scans, etc. It allows them to sell a card at it's maximum value because they eliminate so much of the guesswork. It's about as close as you can get to holding a card in your hands when purchasing online. Most other sellers will get less for their items simply because there is more uncertainty in the card's condition, even if it's slabbed.

1. #3 - They offer multiple creative ways to pay for items. Not just PayPal or Credit Card. I've paid for high-dollar cards with them using personal checks and even Bitcoin. They even accept trade value if you have cards sitting in your vault with them. They also offer loans that leverage cards in your vault as collateral. These might seem like small benefits to some people, but it is a huge perk for many buyers in the high-end market.

1. #4 - Their auctions are always well organized. All the 1950s Topps card listings end around the same time. Same with vintage Hockey, or 1980s basketball. So if you're interested in a particular segment of the market, you see not only the cards you're looking for, but you also get exposure to numerous other listings that you might not have even otherwise thought to look for if you are watching their auctions. Again, this leads to more eyes on their listings, and more eyes equal more money.

1. #5 - Shill bidding. Certainly, some of their consignors shill bid in their auctions. This is true for all sellers on eBay though. We can argue about how much of an effect this has and how widespread it is, but it likely has a small but measurable effect. Every consignment company is subject to these same issues, as is every dishonest individual seller on eBay who shills their own auctions. And even random listings get shill bid on by people who have copies of that same card who are just trying to bump its value. This is an eBay problem to solve though, not the consignment companies'.

Just saw this on Twitter

And he STILL can't produce a back scan!

Perhaps now he'll think he has enough business to omit the front scan too?

"1986 Fleer Michael Jordan PSA 8"

"This is a stock image. You will receive a similar card to the one pictured in this listing."

Maybe he'll follow this guy's lead and include pics of flowers, koala bears, and penguins but no pics of the cards.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/epeco0/m.ht...1&_ipg=&_from=

PWCC needs to do the following:

a) When the Vault Marketplace opens up next month, try to make sure that prices closely reflect today's market. In other words, stop listing them at '2020 prices,' cause' that just isn't going to work now.

b) I will NOT pay a hundred US shipping for a hundred-dollar card! Seriously, WTF! And I'm not paying three-hundred US shipping for a thousand dollar card. They're obviously making profit from shipping and this needs to stop. I've bought all sorts of stuff from Americans over the past twenty years and I know just exactly how much it costs.

c) Limit the amount of times someone can bid on a single auction. Anyone bidding ten or fifteen times on the same item should be given the boot. I don't care if the bids are legit and this guy has a hundred-grand in his bank account - no more games.

d) Stop doing business with known card doctors. I don't know what kind of relationship Moser has or had with Brent, but PWCC needs to distance themselves from guys like him.

Am I reading you correctly and you actually think legit bidders should be booted for bidding so many times in an auction?!?!? So let me get this straight, if there are two bidders going back and forth on an auction and one of them finally makes say their 10th bid, you are for them not being able to bid anymore? And if the other person can still make one more bid they'll win the item by default because the 1st bidder is stopped from bidding again, the consignor gets less than the item would/should have sold for, and the AH loses out on getting more commission.........do I have that all right? I just want to make sure I didn't misread what you just wrote.

That's why I stick to Bud Harrelson, Tito Fuentes, and Hunter Pence autos.... also my ONE Willie Mays auto (in a baseball book) that I got personally while seeing him at the San Jose Airport. We had a nice 20 minute chat, too.

Does anyone have an idea of what the maximum amount of time the FBI might spend would be before bringing charges in a case like the PWCC/PSA/BGS/Probstein/eBay card trimmers and shill bidding scandal?

Also, when did it start? Wasn't it about 3 years ago now?

At some point, we should get to close the door on whether or not PWCC was engaged in illegal activities. If they were/are guilty of what their detractors claim, then Brent, and likely others, will be charged with crimes. At some point we no longer have to guess whether it not they were engaged in illegal activity. We'll know, because we know the FBI looked into it.

If charges are brought against PWCC and/or its owners, then I think it's likely that this ebay email cutting ties with them has something to do with it. However, on the other hand, if charges are not brought against PWCC within the next 6 months? 1 year? 2 years? Then it would be safe to assume that the detractors were wrong all along and that ebay's email likely was defamatory and an attempt to tarnish the reputation of a competitor.

I honestly don't know which direction I'd lean here in terms of who is and isn't guilty and what they might be guilty of. I wouldn't be surprised be either outcome (PWCC collapsing and Brent ending up behind bars or PWCC/PSA/BGS/Probstein all being exonerated). But being 3 years into this with still no charges being brought at all? That's not looking good for the haters. And with every day that passes, it looks less and less likely that they were right. How much time is left in the hourglass of this investigation? When I think about other recent FBI investigations that have been in the news, they were all wrapped up in much sooner than this one and multiple charges were brought against people at different points in time throughout the course of those investigations. Yet we still have no charges from this investigation. Could it be that it was delayed because of the pandemic perhaps? Maybe it's now just heating back up again and that's why ebay cut ties with PWCC? How much longer do we give this? At some point we either need to see some charges or we need to see some apologies.

If there are still no charges by this time next year, I think I'll be pretty firmly in the "they're not guilty" camp. I think 4 years seems like it should be enough time to make that conclusion, but I don't really know. That's just a guess. Maybe these things can take 7+ years for all I know. But it sure seems unlikely to me.

There seems to be two conflicting arguments that have arisen in this issue. One is that eBay is so huge (and they are huge) is that eBay would not miss PWCC's business, and because PWCC's business is so inconsequential to eBay, they would kick them off of eBay out of spite, in an attempt to harm a future competitor.
If PWCC's business is such a small thing to eBay, why would they bother ? Why would they see them as a threat to be concerned with ? As far as competition, almost every major card seller sells on eBay. They also sell from their websites, and some even have their own auction sites. Clean Sweep Auctions and Kevin Savage come to mind. Why doesn't eBay mind this competition ?
The fact that eBay gave PWCC a sweetheart deal, only taking a one to three percent commission (as has recently been learned), definitely makes you think that eBay valued PWCC's business.
So back to my original feeling, there is something more going on here.

You do know that ebay basically went mafia on a couple of tech bloggers right?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/s...rgeting-natick

Ummm :eek:

Yea...that was absolutely insane that they did that.

I known right, petty!


Anyone remember when the Mastro "list" came out and people saw what items they were shilled on. That was a day!

Willie Mays was nice? Now we know you're lying. :D

Bob,

Yes, you read right.

We're all grown men here - not schoolchildren. Why do we need to bid ten times or more?

Hmmm, let's see ... 350 ... 400 ... hehehe ... 425 ... 450 ... oh dear ... 475 ... 499 ... 501 ... hohoho ...

A person bidding like that is either a) not serious about the item or b) shilling it up! Limiting the number of times an individual can bid on a particular item is a great idea and all the major auction houses should consider it!

No disrespect intended but you've got to be kidding. Over the years I have many times bid more than ten times on a particular lot, and in each instance I was hoping my last bid would be my final bid and I would win the item. In some instances I simply do not know how high I am prepared to bid unless faced with the reality of knowing that unless I place another bid, I will not win the item. It is all well and good to say that one should know beforehand how high one will bid. But we are human and there are times we will exceed our preconceived limit once the stark reality of being outbid hits home.

In other instances, I might not feel comfortable leaving max bids. Trust in an AH's bidding integrity is something earned over time, and unless and until I have developed that trust I do not leave max bids.

Do you really think eBay put out the statement they did without having it vetted by their legal team and having ironclad proof?

Not taking sides here, but have you read the link just a few posts up? Higher ups and "Fixers" in Ebay have sent bloody pigs masks, cyber-stalked, surveilled, and essentially terrorized tech bloggers who have been critical of them.

They aren't known for making sound legal decisions to begin with.

Billion dollar companies don't have to be quite as careful as the rest of us. Especially when all the highest executives have giant golden parachutes written into their contracts, should things somehow blow up on them.

Ebay says: "Are we protected?"

Legal team says: "Sure, just show us the money!"

What harm does it cause though to bid like that though? Regardless of whether the item sells for $501 or $5,001 in this case, I don't see what harm this causes. And I don't see how it prevents shill bidding either. If you tell a shill bidder that they can only bid 10 times, do you honestly think this will discourage them from doing so? "Ah shucks, I only get 10 bids? Dammit! I was planning to shill my item up. Well, there goes that idea!" I would argue that if this is a $5,000 item then bids of "350 ... 400 ... 425 ... 450 ... 475 ... 499 ... 501 ..." are probably not shill bids, and if the item is worth around $500 then there's nothing fishy about someone incrementally bidding up to that amount. There are many different ways to detect and prevent shill bidding from a data perspective. But I don't see how this is one of them.

There is a third possibility: The FBI might investigate, find that some of the accusations are true, but for whatever reason, decline to bring charges.

Many times, in extended bidding when I'm going against another bidder, that is exactly how it goes. I remember one time in particular, after we'd leap frogged each other a few times, I decided to discourage him by placing a hard bid that was several increments above his current bid. I won the item with that bid, and since then I've wondered if, in doing so, I bid much more than would've been necessary.

It's hard to legislate honesty.

Covid brought US District Court GJ's to a grinding halt, with only the most serious cases getting any GJ time at all (and not much even for those). I'm not surprised in the least that we haven't seen indictments yet. Wouldn't be surprised if eBay thought they might be coming and decided to kick PWCC to the curb before it happened. Just a guess... maybe just wishful thinking.

Okay, that is an interesting opinion, and I don't think you'll ever see it happening. No self-respecting AH would ever institute such a practice as the first thing I can see consignors doing is taking their items elsewhere from then on. How someone chooses to legitimately bid in an auction is their own business, and I can't understand how your thinking will be of much help. I assume your concern is with shill bidding, if not, I'm really curous to know what it really is.

I saw one other person already responded to your post stating they have at times made multiple bids on auctions, and for exactly the same reason I'm assuming you are concerned with, shill bidding. So are people that do that type of bidding so they don't get stuck leaving a secret max bid out there for some shill bidder to run up wrong? And if so, please tell me exactly what they are supposed to do then. Since auction houses have things like extended bidding, you normally can't just set a snipe bid and forget about it. And the way a lot of these extended bidding periods are set up, they continue on till only one person is still standing. I have gotten into a back and forth in extended bidding periods myself, and at times have only wanted to go one increment at a time so as to hopefully outlast the other bidder without going higher than I have to. During such times things can change also if another lot suddenly went out of reach so I now have more to spend on a lot than originally planned. Or I end up winning a lot I didn't expect to, and so have less money than I anticipated to have and am thus thankful I just didn't put in a secret max bid on the lot I was going bid increment by bid increment on. And the same circumstances can happen with the person you are bidding against, which may suddenly cause them to drop out of a back and forth bidding war and allow you to get something for less than you would have had to pay otherwise.

So you stated what you don't approve of, numerous multiple bids, which I assume is an issue to you in combating shilling. So if that isn't okay, please explain to me how limiting the number of times a person can bid on a particular AH item will actually stop shill bidding. If the number of times someone could bid on an auction item were limited, I would assume someone shilling an auction would simply run the bidding up to where they wanted in fewer bids going forward. So you haven't really stopped the shilling, but you've now succeeded in limiting legit bidders to how often they can bid, potentially costing consignors and AHs money as I said earlier.

And if it turns out you aren't really concerned about shill bidding at all, do you really just dislike the way some legit people bid? If so, would really like to hear from someone who owns/works for an AH to get their perspective on limiting how many times someone can legitimately bid on an auction lot.

And calling people schoolchildren because you personally don't like their legit auction bidding habits is a bit harsh, don't you think?

I always thought there was a psychological angle to bidding 20 times just to slightly increase your max bid. I always thought it was a tactic people used to try to scare others off by making them think the lot has a a lot of competition.

or a tactic used to make people think they are getting shill bid.;)

This is a false equivalency though. This isn't a 'my opinion' vs 'your onion' question either. This is a verifiable claim that can be answered simply by looking at the data. We're specifically discussing the 3 sales of a Mayweather PSA 9 rookie card. Your claim is that they are representative of extremely suspicious behavior and that the hammer prices for those auctions are completely out of line with other commensurate sales of the same card.

An example of "spinning" a debate regarding fraud in this hobby would be if someone were to say that a card wasn't "trimmed" but rather it was "professionally restored by a curator to its original intended state". That would be "spin". I have done nothing of the sort in this debate. What I did was equivalent to saying, "no, that card is not trimmed and I can prove it" followed by a link to a YouTube video where the card in question was pulled in its current condition straight from the pack.

Your claim about the Mayweather card is false. I disproved your claim with data from all commensurate sales of this card which clearly show that the hammer prices of the auctions in question were all perfectly in line with the market and other commensurate sales of that time. You can't just call that "spin". You can say, "Oh, my mistake. I was wrong about this card." You can even follow that up with, "but it doesn't change my mind about PWCC" or something similar. That would be a perfectly reasonable position to hold. But you can't discard the evidence that disproves your claim and then recast it as "spin" without looking unreasonable.

I will reword your question first as Do you really think eBay is capable of putting out the statement they did without having it vetted by their legal team and having ironclad proof?

To this revised version of your question, I would answer yes. Emphatically, yes (although it was certainly also reviewed by their legal team first). I used to live and work only a few blocks from ebay's headquarters. I have several friends who are either current or former employees of eBay. They've also been actively trying to recruit me for years. I've heard many stories from numerous different departments at eBay, all of which shed light on them having a cutthroat corporate culture that I want no part of. An email blast like this is precisely the type of calculated move I would expect from them in an effort to damage their competition. But that doesn't mean this is in fact what happened or that I even believe this to be what happened here. I don't know what went down in this instance. I have no insider knowledge of this particular situation. I'm just saying they are certainly capable of it.

And IF the "individuals associated with PWCC" merely refers to people who consigned with them, then I would have a serious issue with ebay sending out this email and would definitely consider it to be defamatory.

Now you're the one using false equivalencies.

Showing that those listed (assumed) sales were around current market prices does not prove your point. Though most of us were not disputing that as part of the "suspicious" argument anyway.

Some of us feel that (given how people hate to take any losses, and especially quick ones) that it's odd that anyone would continue to sell that particular Mayweather when they did. Especially with a company that has no qualms about being pretty slimy.

You disagree and feel that it was simply people panicking.

These are not objective matters, and you're inaccurately trying to make them so and ignoring a key opposing point to falsely "prove" what you want to assume

Still trying

Have you not noticed how many people in this country don’t care about verifiable data?

If the proposition is, two consecutive people did not win this card and consign it right back to PWCC, then you are right, prices don't disprove that.