[marzoumanian]

Unmasking altered sports cards is extremely difficult work. Just ask the fine people at Blowout Cards. Back in April 2019 they blew the whistle on the trimming of a raw 1952 Topps #311 Mickey Mantle card.
I’m not going to rehash the whole story. But this particular card had been trimmed and ended up being graded a 4.5 by PSA. More diligent work revealed that Long Island-based Gary Moser was behind these alternations. He would purchase graded cards, often from PWCC, crack them out, alter them, and then resubmit them to PSA for grading. The subsequent new grade was almost always higher than the original one, increasing their value when they were put up for auction by PWCC. Moser even had the gumption to place shill bids on these newly-altered graded cards.
All of this was exposed more than three years ago. But for some time now we haven’t heard anything about new altered cards from a source like Blowout Cards. Does this mean that those who were altering are now scared and have decided to lay low? I would not bet on it.
“I think the Blowout guys got discouraged because it doesn’t appear law enforcement is going to do anything,” states a Net54 Forum participant. “In my opinion there’s zero chance the doctoring stopped or even slowed down.”
Why hasn’t law enforcement been able to stop bad apples from altering sports cards? First, they need hard, irrefutable proof and plenty of it. Thanks to the work of Blowout Cards you would think they would have it by now. Second, the pandemic of 2020-21 slowed any and all criminal investigations of any sort. But probably the biggest reason arrests haven’t occurred in this niche is simply because law enforcement has bigger fish to fry. I’m sure that those that doctor cards are emboldened by law enforcement’s attitude and feel they can keep on doing what they do best. I hope I’m wrong but I doubt it.
Let’s look at the big picture and be thankful there are people on sports card forums that are willing to do the tedious and mind-numbing work to discover fraud.
Of course, shining a light on fraud isn’t limited to sports cards. Last August I read a fascinating article in The New York Times about how Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University, uncovered evidence revealing that a Galileo manuscript related to his discovery of moons around Jupiter was a fake. Granted, this was a 20th-century forgery. But the fraud discovery process is what I want to highlight.
For decades the manuscript was a prized possession of the University of Michigan Library. Wilding was examining it online when he noticed some of the letter forms and word choices were strange. In addition, the top and bottom parts of the manuscript were supposedly written months apart yet the ink was exactly the same brown color.
Wilding researched the document’s origins and learned there was no record of it in Italian archives. Instead, it appeared at auction in 1934, was purchased by a Detroit businessman, and bequeathed to the university in 1938, after the businessman died.
Cutting to the chase, it turns out that Tobia Nicotra, a well-known 20th-century counterfeiter in Milan, had faked the document. Why? He was reportedly supporting seven mistresses, according to the article. When his Milan apartment was raided by the police in 1934, they found a virtual forgery factory with endpapers ripped from old books.
This document sat in the U of M Library for decades. Any vintage sports card collector who has been buying cards for at least a decade has to wonder if he holds altered cards, whether they’re raw or graded. Do I have such cards? Gee, I sure hope I don’t. But there’s a good chance I do. The only way I’ll probably find out is when I go to auction one of my baseball card sets and get an email or phone call telling me that one or more of the cards in the set has been altered. Talk about embarrassing. What would you do if this were to happen to you?
All I can hope is that baseball card forum members with the skill and time to discover fraudsters keep plugging away. We need them.