Pack issue in heritage auctions
 

Heritage auctions has many vintage graded packs in there upcoming auctions
some real some bogus,,
non more significant than the 2, 1973 Schmidt packs one appears to be legit
and the other is clearly a home made in a 1975 wrapper.

http://i1188.photobucket.com/albums/...pscab3fd54.png

http://i1188.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2f87fb49.png

I'm hardly an expert on these things. I imagine Heritage will be calling GAI on Monday?

What would make you think they will call.

From reading this thread?

Kevin

Hey, I bet the cards are authentic! :D

I always looked at GAI as a couple steps below SGC/PSA because they assigned a lot of numerical grades to trimmed cards. I always felt they did just as good a job of not slabbing reprints but boy did they slab a lot of trimmed cards. I'd never buy a GAI card that looked trimmed because it probably was, however, I'd always pay a discount on a GAI slabbed card if it looked like it wasn't altered.

Oh yeah, better add, I would hope that the auction house pulls the packs if it is brought to their attention. They can't pull something from the auction if they don't know it's bad. Also, I doubt they would have put it up for bid if they knew there was an issue with it.

You'll have to do a search about calling on a Monday.

After my personal experience with GAI/Global Authority I will not buy anything in one of there slabs.

I spoke with one of the VP's at Heritage just a few minutes ago. They are looking into the matter.

It's the number/code on the back of the cello pack that tells what year the wrapper is from, correct? Are you saying that the code from the 9.5 pack tells us that the cello wrapper is from 1975?

I thought that O-Pee-Chee cards had English and French text. The text on the 9.5 pack indicates it's O-Pee-Chee but the card is in English. I bet they'll pull the lot after they figure this out. They're a good auction house.

Fred, I was confused with the O-Pee-Chee reference on cellos initially as well but I realized that it's on all cellos (american or canadian). If you look at the first scan you can see the full text. The second scan (9.5) has the text wrapped around the side of the pack which makes it confusing.

Thanks, I just looked again and I see what you mean.

Yes the last digit of the serial# signifies the year of the wrapper not necessarily
the pack, for example early that same year (1975) topps used 74 left over cello wrappers at the beginning of the year, they didn't use the actual 75 wrapper
until the end of the production, so if the 75 wrappers were not ready for the
early 75 cello packs them selfs! how did 73 cards got in them? time machine?

That's some impressive investigative work Jose. Well done.

+1

Very good information here on cellos.

Thank you Rob,
just trying to help so some innocent/naive collector don't get taken!

You were right Fred,
they must have figure it out because is gone, was there yesterday gone today,
however collectors should be aware that the 1970 & 1971 topps so-called
grocery cellos are just as bad although not as expensive as the Schmidt pack.

From what I understand, grading and legitimizing of "Grocery Cello Packs" from 1970 and 1971 was the beginning to the end for GAI pack grading (or some may say the end of the end). This mistake lost them a LOT of credibility since it was quickly discovered that Topps never made a "Grocery Cello Pack" in those years.

Jose - I don't see the '71 cello pack marked as "Grocery" on the flip. Is there another way to determine whether this is a legit '71 cello vs the homemade "Grocery Pack".

I think that it's incredibly encouraging that Heritage pulled the 9.5 Schmidt auction. Honestly, I thought that many of the posts earlier in this thread were sarcastic reactions to the OP but maybe I should have given the folks here more credit. Kudos.

Doug

The 3 packs that i mentioned here are complete/total fakes and Heritage has
now take them all down & out, that's a good thing WELL DONE!!

Credit to all concerned
 

A non-infammatory way to bring up what can be a delicate issue for an AH

No none blew up, the AH as you would expect from Heritage did the right thing and the preview helped show the problem.

Now, if we could only have gotten Travis to act that way

Rich

Well some of the problem was fixed,, but there is still a couple of questionable
items/packs left and unfortunately some innocent collector may end up with them,
like the old saying says what you don't know won't hurt you!! at list until you find out that you've been duped.