I think one of the biggest revelations I have had from this whole nasty, grimey situation is how little effort the TPG’s and TPA’s put into documenting the items that pass through their hands.
I am a collector at heart. As a collector at heart, I am, also, and accumulator. And as such, if I were running a multimillion dollar TPG/TPA I would certainly have accumulated a database of every single item that has passed through the hands of my people.
Every item would have been scanned front and back and been assigned a number to which every item could be referenced at any given time.
Could you imagine if in the last 20 years of grading the database that would have been accumulated? It would be so easy for fraud and forgeries to be ferreted out. Trimmings, alterations, etc would pop like color on a black canvas.
It seems to me such a wasted opportunity for those in control of TPG/TPA’s to have documented their entire history of submissions.
I can’t imagine how much easier it would be for law enforcement to know who and what was submitted at any given time.
And talk about provenance? Their information would be worth millions alone!
Crossovers would be able to be tracked and pop reports across the board would be so much more accurate.
As it stands now, if one wanted to dump the market on a certain grade card all they have to do is keep cracking the same cards and resubmitting them to artificially inflate the population, thus, essentially, destroying a market for any individual card.
It would have taken seconds per transaction to have scanned and documented every submission, now it’s just been a wast of nearly 20 years worth of data.
Oh the hobby...always so slow to embrace technology.
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