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Judge DredI've been lucky with Lew for the most part. One lot I won a few years ago from him included two 19th century cards. They were both raw. One was an N28 HOF and the other was an N300 HOF. Yes, the described grades were a bit generous and he noted that the grading services stated that there was color added to the N300, although he didn't believe that to be the case.
The nice part about this lot was the lot was "sold as is" with no returns. I figure the bidding on the lot was minimal because of this. I got lucky because the N28 made a decent grade but he N300 came back as "color added" as I figured it would. In any case I figured the N300 HOF cost me nothing when the value of the N28 was taken into consideration.
I'm not defending Lew on this but his auction rules state that "we do not accept the opinions of third party graders" and he does provide a detailed return policy.
Here's a cool story for the books. I won a card in a Mastro auction (this was at least 5 years ago I'm guessing) and put it aside for about 6 months before sending it in to get graded. The card came back with eveidence of trimming. I thought it was a bit short but figured it was legit because of the source from which it was purchased. Believe this or not - Just for the heck of it I called Mastronet and I think I spoke with Kevin (although I can't be sure now). He said that he was very sorry and wanted to know what they could do about it to make it right. We came up with an amicable settlement and we were both satisfied with the end result - this was 6 MONTHS AFTER the auction ended. Wow!!!
Andrew, I'm sorry to hear about the horror story but for what it's worth you learned a lesson and by sharing the story others might learn something from it.
It would be nice if you were able to get the card labeled as authentic. This would at least place a nicer valuation on the card and you'd probably be able to recoup any losses on the card prior to having the "authentic" label.