THE MARKEL REPORT: Are Graded Baseball Cards Being “Juiced” (Aesthetically Enhanced)?

[WhenItWasAHobby]

Peter,

The two Jim Kings were sold around Jan. and Feb. 2007 by eBay seller "excuzme". I saved the scans directly to my hard drive, and also had them backed up on several networks managed by an IT group who could prove they pre-existed before the graded cards showed up on eBay.

The '61 Cheney and the '67 Ellis were originally mine. I made high resolution scans of those cards (about 6 megabytes each) - front and back and asked an attorney in Dallas to list them on eBay along with about 70 other cards between Oct. 2007 to early this year. Susor bought about 30 of them and typically sits on them for 12 to 18 months. We have since then bought back 5 and all appear to be altered to various degrees. The '61 Cheney are the '67 Ellis are the best examples. I have a '64 Osteen that was micro-trimmed. I'll show scans later.

The other 40 were also tracked and several were bought back from "good collectors" with no signs of alteration. Frank Bakka was one of them.