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Posted By: Matt

Assuming the seller retracts the listing, this still smacks of unethical ebay behavior. Assuming the facts are as we are supposing, the seller had a choice to make - sell it as 100% authentic and hope you don't get caught (and hope it IS authentic) or sell it as "unknown authenticity" and take a hit financially. The only downside for the seller in the first option is that if he gets caught he either ends the auction or refunds the buyers money. Both possibilites are significantly cheaper to listing it as "questionable authenticity."

Unfortunately, this ebay behavior is fairly common (even amongst big ebay sellers) - consider a seller advertising a raw card as being in NM when it is in fact trimmed. The seller could say the card is trimmed (or may be trimmed), but the lost income would far outweigh the option of processing a return if the buyer finds out it is trimmed, and there's hope that the buyer won't know the difference or won't want to be out the 2X shipping costs and will keep the card.

In all such cases the seller can always claim it was an honest mistake - I didn't know it was fake or I didn't know it was trimmed and appear morally clean which is exactly why it is unethical. With a unique item such as this, I would expect a seller to let us know why she thinks it is 100% authentic - "because a dealer told me so" or "because they said so on the Net54 board." Otherwise, a statement of "100% Authentic" suggests that the seller is enough of an authority on the item to be certain of its authenticity.