Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Some description of cards involved and how it unfolded, I assume you don't want to name the con man.
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Not sure that I even know his real name. I do know his alias, or what he called himself. I also think that several of the other parties that were allegedly involved were probably just alter-egos. Nowadays, anytime I run into someone with the same last name, I immediately assume they must be fraudsters. Just an unconscious knee-jerk reaction.
Basically his dad had just died and left behind a very nice collection. I'm a Mays collector, and based on some of the scans he sent to me, for example, there was a Mays 52T in PSA 8. And based on the PSA cert, his dad would have had a very nice collection indeed, because this cert was connected with a very significant collection in the PSA set registry.
We discussed it for a while, and his attorney contacted me (again, probably just him through another email address spoofing the attorney). I checked out the attorney's license with the state bar, and everything checked out. We agreed to meet in a couple of weeks to do the deal. He would deliver the cards, we would agree on a final price based on everything there, and I would pay him. We signed some legal docs. I agreed to pay a small amount as a deposit to hold the deal.
And, not that different than most cons, it slowly unfolded. There were delays. There was a need for more money to hold the collection. There were more delays. We communicated almost every day. The attorney sent me details and court orders and whatnot. It was always the case that we were going to meet in a couple of days and settle up. Almost there! Not quite...almost there! Just a few more days and a few more dollars.
And hell, once you're in it a little, and you're believing everything they have to say, then it's easy to keep baby stepping your way through it. You start looking for reasons why the inconsistencies and nonsense must be accurate. And so you just keep going. Total sunk cost fallacy at play, and yet it's a powerful psychological feature.
Eventually I started to push them a bit, and only make payments over more secure channels like paypal goods and services, or using a credit card.
I think the final straw that eliminated all doubt in my mind was when he charged my credit card about 15 times over the course of about 3 days, running up around 10k per charge. Luckily, I got the credit card company to reverse all of those charges, but it took a long fight. The goons asserted that they had provided construction services on my house, which was completely risible, but the credit card company bought it. So then I had to spend a lot of time convincing the credit card company that this "vendor" was not a real business, and they had never actually done anything other than attempt to (and succeed at) stealing my money.
As a worthless side effect, nowadays, just about any time I try to buy anything, my credit card company sometimes just denies the charge, and often they immediately text me to make sure that it's legit.
So there you go. Con artist 101 all day long.