Posted By:
CoreyRS.hanusBarry, Al, you say it very well.
A grading company should be the bastion of integrity for the hobby. Good faith purchasers are relying on the good will associated with their name to make purchasing decisions. That reliance is violated when the grading company consciously releases back to circulation cards in their original slabs that they know are either overgraded or altered. As has been pointed out, that is a win/win/lose. Win for the grading company (they don't have to compensate the card owner for getting it wrong the first time and they also encourage more re-submissions), win for the card owner (his card is not downgraded, though I might add if the grading company were to compensate him for a downgrade, what has he lost?), but lose for good-faith-third-party purchasers (they are buying an overgraded or altered card).
If this practice is okay, then how does it differ from an auction house prepping a card for grading? That too would be the same win/win/lose. The consigner wins because he will get more for his card, the auction house wins because the more the card sells for, the more money they make. But the good-faith purchaser loses becauses he just bought a prepped card. The view on this board seems to be unanimous that such an action by the auction house cannot be justified on the grounds that it is a rational profit-maximizing action. So why then is that same profit-maximizing rationale used to support an action by the grading company that has the same deleterious impact on good-faith-third-party purchasers?