Probstein video about trimmed cards

[gunboat82]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

To put some legal context on this, selling an item in interstate commerce knowing a material fact has been misrepresented or omitted certainly can be mail fraud and/or wire fraud. Travis' point, essentially, is that we have reached the point where the fact that a slabbed card is trimmed is no longer material. Incredibly, and sadly, he may be right. The flip is the commodity and the slab sanitizes.

This is fair, but I think of the slabbed card as "laundered money" in this context.

If an auction house has no reason to suspect that the consignor is laundering trimmed cards through a third-party grader, then I wouldn't hold the auction house accountable.

If an auction house is doing business with a known trimmer, we're getting into an ethical gray area, but there's too much uncertainty to hold the auction house accountable for individual listings.

If an auction house is knowingly taking trimmed cards that were slabbed as unaltered, then they're essentially just fencing fraudulent goods.

I don't think the slabs make trimming an immaterial fact; I think they just make it much harder to detect. I still think it's worthwhile to identify altered cards when possible and to pass that information along to consumers. We're probably just talking past each other, but Travis' "hobby clowns" reference gave me the impression that he sees Probstein and others as the real victims now that they've successfully flooded the market with secretly altered cards, and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by gunboat82

This is fair, but I think of the slabbed card as "laundered money" in this context.

If an auction house has no reason to suspect that the consignor is laundering trimmed cards through a third-party grader, then I wouldn't hold the auction house accountable.

If an auction house is doing business with a known trimmer, we're getting into an ethical gray area, but there's too much uncertainty to hold the auction house accountable for individual listings.

If an auction house is knowingly taking trimmed cards that were slabbed as unaltered, then they're essentially just fencing fraudulent goods.

I don't think the slabs make trimming an immaterial fact; I think they just make it much harder to detect. I still think it's worthwhile to identify altered cards when possible and to pass that information along to consumers. We're probably just talking past each other, but Travis' "hobby clowns" reference gave me the impression that he sees Probstein and others as the real victims now that they've successfully flooded the market with secretly altered cards, and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Nobody objects to alteration as much as I do, or tried as hard to publicly make the case that knowingly selling trimmed cards is criminal, but based on what I see in terms of people not caring and prices not being affected, I'm not so sure any more about the materiality element.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by gunboat82

This is fair, but I think of the slabbed card as "laundered money" in this context.

Perhaps that's a fair way to view a botched-up card that is clearly trimmed and passed through grading because the grader just finished a line of coke in the bathroom prior to examining it, but is it really "laundered money" though if the card can be cracked out and resubmitted 100 times having passed grading each time because it doesn't actually bear any evidence of trimming?

This is the problem we're up against. Many of these cards that were identified as trimmed by BODA were reexamined by the best graders in the world, and those graders still couldn't find any physical evidence of trimming. Yes, I know you can write this off as a conspiracy and claim that it's just an obvious conflict of interest, but you'd be a fool to think that sufficiently explains away the problem. A card can indeed be trimmed and yet be completely indistinguishable from one with a factory-cut edge. This fact gets overlooked, or worse, rejected by too many people in this hobby. Yet it is the single most important truth in the entire discussion when trying to come up with solutions.

Originally Posted by gunboat82

Travis' "hobby clowns" reference gave me the impression that he sees Probstein and others as the real victims now that they've successfully flooded the market with secretly altered cards, and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm defending businesses like Probstein's because it's not their responsibility to police this stuff. That would be like expecting a pawn shop to have to scour the web for hours every day, checking to see if a set of golf clubs that someone brought into their shop may have been stolen property. The hobby clowns are barking up the wrong trees. Constantly. SCR is the worst.

[Peter_Spaeth]

The irony. PSA, whose very premise (the stated one anyhow) was to catch card doctoring, is a major player in legitimizing card doctoring. Probably the most important one. It's almost funny.