Running list of 2022 Hobby Scams

[BobC]

Originally Posted by swarmee

Rumors so far is that they were opening up their own card shop and plowed funds into that. Another rumor is that they were overinvested in PSA base cards which are now dropping like rocks. Another rumor is that they invested in cryptocurrency at the peak, and it's now down about 40%.
I'll keep following it. I expect both criminal and civil liability due to the lack of escrow while operating in the capacity of a financial managers, and the lawsuits from submitters trying to get their funds back in bankruptcy court. (ed note: I am not a lawyer, so this is only my personal untrained thought.)

Regarding Marx Cards, all of these could have played a factor in what happened, and then resulted in not so much a failure of a pyramid scheme, but more like the failure of a kiting scheme.

Pure guess on my part, but can see the aforementioned various factors putting a pinch on cash profit from operations, so they dip into funds being held to actually pay the grading fees, and figure they'll get caught up in the future. They don't worry about it when it comes time to actually pay grading fees to PSA in the interim as they become due because they expect to keep getting more continuing orders and grading fee deposits in. Well, then along comes the pandemic and all the PSA issues where they basically shut down new submissions for a while, and significantly jack up up the grading fees. So as a result, the continuous ongoing new submissions ends up taking a big hit, and with it, the influx of grading fee deposits they need to keep covering all the bills coming into Marx Cards, including the grading fee bills from PSA. Think about the timing of when all of this has been happening, and how PSA is finally starting to get caught up and billing people for those grading fees. Chances are Marx may have started doing the math and realized they weren't getting enough new deposits coming in to get them over the hump, realized all these PSA grading fee bills would soon be rolling in, and played the bankruptcy card now to try and get out of this.

Not sure on the legal side if the people can come back at them. Don't know exactly how the contracts people entered into with Marx Cards (assuming there is some written document or agreement) are written and what they may say. I'll leave that to the attorneys on here if they want to weigh in. Wouldn't be completely shocked if the Marx Cards people end up not being personally liable, assuming the company was set up in an appropriate corporate or LLC form, which can then afford the owners protection from personal liability from company debts.