Joseph M Pankiewicz, you are a disgrace to this hobby!

[WhenItWasAHobby]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

I agree Peter that it's a complicated issue with many answers. I also feel the only thing that can really defeat the card doctors is the marketplace. If people stopped buying their product, they would go away, and find another way to rip off the public, like stealing hub caps. But as long as their product is very marketable and in very high demand, they will continue with business as usual.

How true and there lies the problem: the vast majority of the collectors either accept it and live with it and continue to spend a lot of money, while others deny there's even a problem.

I tried very hard to get at least 4 law enforcement agencies involved and there a lot of legal hurdles. One big problem is that people outside of the hobby just don't feel the weight of the problem since there aren't any industry standards of what constitutes card doctoring as fraud as opposed to "acceptable" cleaning or repairing such as flattening bent corners or removing wrinkles. The coin industry tried to roundup a bunch of coin doctors several years back and ran into this same type of problem.

But like anything if there is a strong commitment, law enforcement can do something about it and something needs be done since it pretty much goes unchecked and all indications are that it is widespread among a significant number of dealers and there's no doubt its a multimillion dollar industry. If several of these miscreants go down hard, I'm sure it will scare off many more.