Heritage Auction problem

[benjulmag]

Originally Posted by travrosty

have a super day,

just thought it was a no tolerance policy and not a sliding scale, whatever, moving on.

the reason haulsofshame deserves peoples support is that it is one of the biggest, most aggresive website trying to combat the problems in the hobby.

Most people agree the hobby is suffering from forgeries in the autograph realm, helped along by tpa's and auction houses that either trust the tpa's or don't do their own investigations into the fakes, reprints, preprints, autopens, secretarials, stamps, reproductions, copies, laser copies, etc.

A lot of collectors won't even mention a TPA name online for fear of reprisal. Or an auction house. You do and you get banned from an auction house, pigeonholed, castigated, harangued, and worse. People will ask you to leave the hobby if you hate it that much. They ask you why you don't want to help the TPA's to make the hobby better, but if helping them pass a stamped Campanella signature is helping the TPA's, then count me out. It's a closed loop system. You aren't invited to help the TPA's get better. They are comfortable with what they are doing now.

People putting their neck on the line by standing up to subpar authentication and auction house policies are trying to HELP the hobby. Would Heritage have done anything about the premature "auction loa" listings if we just gave up after the first round of a ten round bout? NO, hauls of shame keeps hammering, collectors keep hammering, and it took a nash article on a ty cobb ball that had one of these auction loa when there wasn't one - for Heritage to FINALLY do something, and then act like this was some type of a new problem, and they will fix it for the good of the hobby and that they never posted and item with a premature auciton loa that was up for live bidding. (not true and we proved it and posted the weekly internet auctions where that was happening on numerous occasions.) I threw up my lunch.

I love the hobby, I hate the system of backdoor authentication based on who is submitting, the limited or non existant expertise in many areas (boxing anyone?) that promulgate the growing population of these preprints, forgeries and secretarials that are increasingly showing up in a slab with many humming the same chorus, that it is encapsulated for unquestioned authenticity.

The tpa's website say that, along with the tagline that they have pooled together the world's experts. Did they really search over the whole world? Why is everyone from the U.S. then? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The people who work there keep saying the same thing over and over again. That is you see an LOA from them, you can be assured you are getting the real deal, an authentic autograph. Oh please!

How many websites out there are trying to combat the fakes and stolen stuff? Not many, Hauls of shame does, and I support any effort that does. I commend Richard Simon for supporting these efforts too.

So if during the height of Prohibition Al Capone published a newspaper devoted to exposing mob influence in all areas except those he was involved in, you would regard him as one of the good guys deserving of public support?