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Originally Posted by David R
Actually "material omissions" are not fraud unless you have some duty to disclose the facts. You might have such a duty if other things you have said would be misleading without further disclosure but absent an untrue or misleading statement or some special relationship with the buyer, there is no duty to disclose a fact like this (i.e., that you found a lot more of these high grade cards). In any sale, there are lots of facts the buyer or seller would want to know that would affect the price. We may think it's nice that the family left a lot of money on the table by having/letting Heritage disclose the existence of the other cards in the find, but it would not have been illegal or unethical not to have made such disclosures. Personally I think it was foolish but I understand why others feel it's admirable.
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Yes, that's the standard, but in my view it would be very difficult to say anything at all about the cards that wouldn't be misleading if it omitted this clearly material information. And if you said absolutely nothing, surely you would get inquiries anyhow. EDIT TO ADD And even if a good lawyer could successfully make a "no duty to disclose" argument, such as one sometimes sees in securities fraud cases, it's still a lousy business practice for an auction house to conceal material information about a card, and it would not have served Heritage well down the road.