[Exhibitman]

Fraud is more or less common sense, guys: would you want to know that the card had been trimmed, cleaned with a solvent, pressed to remove wrinkles, etc., when you buy the card? You would? Then the alteration is material and not disclosing it is fraudulent concealment.

But then there's PSA (or Beckett, except no one uses them here, so we can go with PSA). So how does that work?

You send the card to PSA without telling PSA you did something to it and you get it through. Yay!

So you sell your freshly graded card on eBay. Guess, what? You're still a fraudster, dumbass. You knew what the card went through and you didn't tell the buyer what you'd done to the card.

So, not wanting to be that dumbass, you decide to send it to a useful idiot on consignment. Let's call the useful idiot "Brent". You don't tell "Brent the useful idiot" that you altered the card and he sells it as a PSA graded card. Yay! Money!

But then some pesky kids on some chat board figure out what you did and they have photographic proof of it. Whoops! But you figure you are OK since PSA and Brent the useful idiot are the ones who certed the card and sold the card, respectively. The chump who bought the card can't claim you didn't disclose anything; you never even interacted with him. So the chump will go after Brent the useful idiot, and Brent the useful idiot will send the chump to PSA to enforce PSA's guarantee (yeah, good luck with that). PSA can't claim the card was altered without looking like a giant clown college instead of a legitimate expert outfit, so they probably will never voluntarily pay off. And most of the chumps won't have any way to sue PSA because they can't afford to pay an attorney and retain an expert to testify, so there will be lots of meaningless chatter across the blogosphere, but so what, you got your money!

What you forget is that if the card is in the window of returns or credit card disputes, Brent the useful idiot is going to get a charge back and he's gonna want his money back from you. Even an idiot wants a refund...And you also forgot about the ways you cheated Brent and PSA with your antics, which amount to an honest services fraud perpetrated against them, all undertaken through the mail. So you are a dumbass all over again, because even though you've not sold a thing directly, you used the mail to send all sorts of stuff you knew was bad to Brent the useful idiot and to the large company, and you managed to do a crime that you never even heard of if that Laurie Loughlin chick hadn't bribed her stupid daughters' ways into USC. Whoops. Worst of all, everyone following this scandal knows your name and many of the players know where you live and the press is starting to circle around.

Then the knock on the door...If you are lucky it is just a process server. If you are unlucky it is an investigator from law enforcement. If you are really unlucky it is one of those really pissed off chumps with a baseball bat.