Warning: Disturbing Autograph "Authentication" Material!

[travrosty]

Originally Posted by slidekellyslide

So if I pay $20,000 for a signed FDC that was given an auction letter by Spence am I pretty much guaranteed I can get a full letter from Spence even if on second look it's an obvious forgery?

well, they said at the time that auction loa was a "preliminary review" and if the inspection for the full loa differed with the auction loa, then you would get some type of credit for another authentication in the future. i guess you would have to take it up with the auction house then, but of course the auction house employs the TPA to avoid that type of liability.

now psa has a pre-certification, which is an auction loa only under another name. but the pre-certification does guarantee that it WILL pass for the full loa, but i dont know that the process they use to issue the pre-certification is any different than what they used for the auction loa's, which in many instances was looking at scans of the items via the computer. probably why jsa issued an auction loa for a mike tyson preprint that sold at heritage auction a couple of months ago with a coveted 'JSA AUCTION LOA'

its all very confusing and i think the companies dont mind it being that way, they are impossible to pin down just as to what an auction loa and precertification really mean.

and we have tried to ask those questions multiple times with a certain auction house, and all we got was circular logic that didn't lead anywhere. we kept asking and asking just what an auction loa was and what is the difference now that they have pre-certification instead of auction loa, and what the deal was, and we got doublespeak, doubletalk and babbling that we couldn't understand.

Can't pin them down on how exactly they inspect each item for an auction loa, pre-certification or full certification for that matter. They don't seem to want to care to explain it either. They all want to push liability onto the other party, with the ultimate excuse is that it is just "their opinion".