Posted By:
Aaron M.leon, come on. You are smarter than that.
Did Doug not see the e-mail that the Gameused forum's administrator sent him?
Did Doug not see the threads on this forum and on the Game used forum openly discussing the shirt several days before the actual auction?
Did no-one at Mastro alert Doug to the MEARS letter and/or to these threads and/or to efforts to contact Mastro about the shirt?
At minimum, this indicates: (1) a shocking lack of over sight over what was a very small auction (just 80-somthing items), (2) a shocking lack of checks and balances within Mastro's authentication system, and (3) and a shocking willingness within Mastro to list an item that had been strongly discredited by an authentication service not known for standing up to Mastro. (Or are you willing to go so far as to assert that no-one at Mastro ever read the MEARS letter or was aware of the discussions threads or e-mails?)
I complained about not receiving photos of a set of cards in a Mastro auction earlier this year on this site and within hours was called by a very apologetic Mastro employee and had the photos sent to me.
You're telling me two forums discussing a $10,000 shirt that was carrying a questionable LOA that was about to sell in Mastro's inaugural live auction just slipped under the radar?
Uch, leon, come on.
In this instance Mastro screwed up (perhaps fraudulently, perhaps simple bad management). And they owe the collecting community a forthcoming explanation and an apology and publicly stated new measures to ensure that this doesn't happen again (like either declining to sell items that their authenticators have been unable to authenticate or at least disclosing such in an item's description).
Simply voiding the sale for the deceived buyer is not nearly enough, because it doesn't address everything that went wrong before Allen voided the sale.
As to your belief that O'Keefe has a vendetta against Mastro as fact, by the same token posters can just as credibly assert as fact that you are an apologist for Mastro, hopelessly biased because of personal and financial reasons. I'm not saying either stament is true. Just that the neither statement is any more a "fact" than the other.
And again, I don't care if O'Keefe is biased. I think what you see as a "vendetta" is his belief that there's a story at Mastro and he wants to be the reporter who blows the lid off it. And like I said in my earlier post: more power to him. His applying heat to Mastro is in our best interests (this article is yet another example because it shed light on Mastro's authentication process and an obvious breakdown in ethical judgment), so have at it.