[JustinD]

Certainly annoying, but I would venture a guess that this is a reaction to the Topps rookie premier scandals and the similar ones. For many years they have been selling both fake autographed cards and fake factory autos on ebay that were backdoored blanks like this 2007 Rookie Premier series -



The scam was submitting a real card with a fake auto for an Auth grade and then listing them to the clueless as "Authentic Autos" on eBay. There was hundreds of thousands of dollars scammed this way. This also worked with actual grading as 10 years ago you could submit a factory signed card with an auto and just get a red grade and not a dna grade, meaning the grader would ignore the auto. This was perfect for backdoor and autopen cards as it was graded a 9 or 10 with a red label. People completely overlooked that there was no auto grade and thought, rather logically if you are uninformed, that this meant the entire card was sound.

I believe in the case of the Rookie Premiers it got to the point they were at a time completely blacklisted on Ebay as far more than the majority were fake autos. There are more red labeled number graded cards of that series with fake autos than real...by a sizable percentage.