Trimming Frauds Revealed | How Does It Impact Vintage???

[Peter_Spaeth]

There are some guys on Blowout who are just relentless about figuring stuff out. The discovery of the ebay seller advertising at Berkeley for an engineering student to modify a paper cutter is priceless. It's all probably far more pervasive than we believe and yeah, the TPG's are pretty limited but what do you expect for your $10?

[Bigdaddy]

As long as we keep up this crazy practice of exponential price differences between 8-9-10 grades, then this type of practice will be incentivized and rewarded by certain parts of the hobby. And the fact that the TPGs act as enablers - "resubmit and maybe get a bump in grade (and in the corresponding resale price)" only encourages the scammers.

The industry is ripe for a TPG that will use computer technology to give consistent and reproducible grades. Submit the same card 10 times and get the same grade every time. And it does not depend on the person who handles the card.

Computer vision systems could detect trimmed cards and other alterations and be completely automated. With facial recognition, image processing, machine learning, and other software technologies being used in so many other fields, it seems almost archaic to have cards graded the way they are now.

Reduce the incentives and reduce the alterations.

[itslarry]

Originally Posted by Bigdaddy

As long as we keep up this crazy practice of exponential price differences between 8-9-10 grades, then this type of practice will be incentivized and rewarded by certain parts of the hobby. And the fact that the TPGs act as enablers - "resubmit and maybe get a bump in grade (and in the corresponding resale price)" only encourages the scammers.

The industry is ripe for a TPG that will use computer technology to give consistent and reproducible grades. Submit the same card 10 times and get the same grade every time. And it does not depend on the person who handles the card.

Computer vision systems could detect trimmed cards and other alterations and be completely automated. With facial recognition, image processing, machine learning, and other software technologies being used in so many other fields, it seems almost archaic to have cards graded the way they are now.

Reduce the incentives and reduce the alterations.

That would kill the tpg industry. They make $$$ of crackouts and resubs for higher grades.