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Posted By: Corey R. Shanus

Not sure you're correct about that one. There can still be fraud even though in the end the description ended up being accurate. Just then in that case there would be no damages, but there was still fraud (i.e., the failure to disclose material info). Let me give a real example, which Barry and I discussed on this Board some months ago -- the sale by Sotheby's some years ago of a tintype they opined was of Jim Creighton. We produced voluminous documentation to establish the image could not have been of Creighton. Sotheby's ended up disclosing none of it, and we wrote an article describing the incident and opining that the intentional withholding of that documentation constituted fraud. Now suppose years later it turns out that for reasons nobody could have imagined at the time that the image was of Creighton. That doesn't mean that Sotheby's did not commit fraud, only that now the buyer has suffered no damages.