Quote:
Originally Posted by 1952boyntoncollector
It always will come back to the original owner eventually. If AH sells a card for 100k to person A, then Person A sells the card to Person B for 100k. You think that the AH is in the clear? Person B would end up suing person A and person A would end up suing the AH....it will always trace back to the original buyer if they can find him
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There is a chain of command (sales).
In cases of stolen items, the buyer gets the refund from the seller, that seller gets a refund from the person who he bought it from, etc. That's the legal chain of command and is also one reason why people should keep their receipts.
I was just saying, and in fact said, that my opinion is in general the refund should from the person you bought it from. If you buy a counterfeit T206, you expect the refund to come from the person you bought it from (and eBay, paypal and your credit card company will agree). The seller may honestly say he too was duped, but he still has to give the refund. The seller of course has the right to turn and get his purchase money back from the person he bought it from, but he doesn't have the right to say "I was duped so I don't have to give a refund." . . . As I acknowledged, this thread's scenario is a bit different than the home computer reprint T206 in that the issue is about a LOA that accompanied and not just the sale itself-- though I definitely still look to the terms of the original auction. Should the return/refund terms have been included in the LOA? Sure . . . If a LOA states "This LOA will expire on June 1 1992. If this letter is in error you must get your refund before then." will someone down the road on a chat board say that it should still be a lifetime guarantee? Probably.
I will add that if sellers and buyers took more responsibility for the the items they bought/sold, the hobby would be better. When a seller says "Is the card I'm selling altered or correctly graded? It doesn't matter to me and I don't even care, because it's in a holder with a PSA label at top. Not my responsibility" and when a buyer doesn't even look at the signature in the eBay picture because it comes with a LOA and the LOA is "all that matters", there are problems. And the problem is that, even with people who acknowledge the fallibility and margin of errors and "it's just someone's opinion" of LOAs and grading, this has on a become institutionalized into the hobby. The original poster both said to the effect "I know LOAs aren't worth the paper they're written on" and considered it as an ironclad lifetime guarantee of authenticity. Those two statements are a mismatch and demonstrate an elemental problem in today's hobby. If he instead said "I know LOAs aren't worth the paper they're written on" and "I know the LOAs aren't worth the paper they're written on, then his statements would have been in alignment. . . . Duly note that I'm not casting aspersions on the original poster in that I know he is a seasoned and knowledgeable collector and was in fact the one to do the research and uncover the misidentification of the item. I'm not suggesting that he's one who doesn't do his homework and blindly takes LOAs at face value. I realize his post is about how and from whom to get a refund on a misidentified item he bought-- and that (following my line of thinking) he first inquired about getting the refund from the seller.
A fundamental problem in today's high grade graded card hobby is that the grading has a margin of error (that is acknowledged by most everyone on any baseball card chat boad and as demonstrated by all the resubmissions do to get different grades), yet the PSA registry and auction house prices are often based on 100% accuracy of the grade. Scientists, statisticians and mathematicians would mock this, and there's no other way to put it than to say its foolishness. And that's not even touching on the subject of altered cards which makes a '10' in reality a '0.' The high grade card hobby and all those "record prices" involve a lot of smoke and mirrors and a line of thinking that would earn you an F in college 101 classes that require elemental logic . . . Though I'm not ignorant about economics and understand that many people are really collecting prices not cards. For the investor in high grade cards, it's the financial return that is the key, and successful investing and business regularity involves playing on the irrationality, psychology and margins of error in the market. Card resubmitters for profit are the first the be aware of the margins of error in professional grading.