View Single Post
  #139  
Old 07-05-2015, 12:45 PM
Peter_Spaeth's Avatar
Peter_Spaeth Peter_Spaeth is offline
Peter Spaeth
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 30,591
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by WhenItWasAHobby View Post
I've been away for the past week - so sorry joining in late.

My two cents is that there was likely a wide scale scheme to defraud for quite a long period of time in various capacities. The most egregious was knowingly selling fake memorabilia - such as the phony Elvis hair or the 1869 Redlegs baseball. Next, and nearly as egregious was selling doctored cards. And yes there was the shill bidding - which is fraud.

To me, the selling of the fake and doctored items is the fraud that keeps on giving since those items will at some point and time will be or have been re-sold and this is the stuff that needs to be sought out and removed and the buyers need to be compensated. I'm not trying to minimize shill bidding, but it's obviously next to impossible to prove if all or most of the evidence has been destroyed and the damages amount to just some percentage of the item purchased (typically 10% to 30%).
It seems we have a reasonable sense of the extent of the shill bidding from the Mastro plea agreement, but no information if the card altering bombshell in the Allen plea agreement was a one off thing (I doubt it) or just the tip of the iceberg and part of a regular practice.
__________________
My avatar is a sketch by my son who is an art school graduate. Some of his sketches and paintings are at
https://www.jamesspaethartwork.com/

He is available to do custom drawings in graphite, charcoal and other media. He also sells some of his works as note cards/greeting cards on Etsy under JamesSpaethArt.

Last edited by Peter_Spaeth; 07-05-2015 at 12:45 PM.