"Grading Scandal" in a nutshell, please

[drcy]

Originally Posted by 1952boyntoncollector

a billion dollar fraud but for whatever reason no lawsuits....any other billion dollar frauds with no lawsuits?

How do you know there have been no lawsuits?

[1952boyntoncollector]

Originally Posted by drcy

How do you know there have been no lawsuits?

i dont, as i have said before correct me if i an wrong. I assume someone on blowout or somewhere else would of mentioned it. lawsuits are not secrets they are in public view

[KLSDAD]

Could somebody nutshell a who's who? Both here and (mainly) at Blowout alot of the conversation assumes that everyone is up on all the players.

Just a quick summary like...

Grading companies and each's main offenses
Grading company execs/management in the spotlight
Grading company whistleblowers
Offline auction companies and execs
Online auction companies/screennames
Sellers linked to shady auction companies
Alleged trimmers
Blowout whitleblowers

Hmmm....looks like alot of work. Then I see a gazillion posts on message boards (mainly at Blowout) and think that maybe some effort could be redirected.

[swarmee]

PSA (Joe Orlando / Steve Sloan): Either horribly incompetent at detecting alterations or partially incompetent and partially complicit in fraud, giving favored submitters higher grades than regular Joes or passing through altered cards as unaltered to keep the submissions rolling in.
BGS: Incompetent at detecting trimming on modern cards; have been giving favored submitters like Leaf and Joe Clemons (former BGS employee) an impossible number of BGS 10 (Pristines and Black Labels with all 4 BGS 10 subgrades). These sell for like 5x what a Gem Mint 9.5 card sells for on the same modern cards.
SGC: Graded some very high value trimmed or recolored cards with numbers at the National Convention (like $50K each) that were outed, plus were heavily used by OCSI to grade trimmed cards. Not used as often on modern since their resale value is much lower than PSA or BGS. Also closed their autograph authentication wing after they agreed with JSA that 12 Sharpie signed T206 cards were outed as counterfeits and slabbed them as Authentic. Those sold for thousands apiece.

As of now, not many internal whistleblowers, but many high submitters who attended the BGS or PSA annual meetings have been outed as card alterers.

Small Traditions is probably the biggest auctionhouse who have been outed as trimming the heck out of cards, but it's highly likely there are others. Paper trails are smaller with auctionhouses because of their secret consignors and kind of invisible employees.

PWCC (Brent Huigens) is well-known already.

COMC had some former employees accused of trimming and selling through COMC, and some of their largest sellers were outed as trimmers. COMC is trying to buy back the cards that have been outed and their owner Tim Getsch has promised to write some code to detect trimming on cards in their scans. Refunds are super slow going since they only have a small team working the refunds, and that same team is supposedly also working their rollout of eBay auctions.

Check the www.sportscardradio.com site to see many of the accusers trimmers and other scammers currently operating in the hobby.

[Bram99]

Hello,

Has anyone created a document version (excel or Word possibly) of all of the suspect altered/trimmed cards from the various Blowout forum and other listings? It seems extremely difficult to wade through all of these forum pages to find such a listing. I am looking for something easily searchable.

Tony

[Fred]

Originally Posted by Bram99

Hello,

Has anyone created a document version (excel or Word possibly) of all of the suspect altered/trimmed cards from the various Blowout forum and other listings? It seems extremely difficult to wade through all of these forum pages to find such a listing. I am looking for something easily searchable.

Tony

Any list you get will not be accurate unless PSA Cert# 00000001 is on the list.

[perezfan]

Probably far too many to keep track of, at this point. Someone would need to invest hundreds of hours, to properly log them all.

You really have to exercise your own due diligence.

[swarmee]

I mean, you could do a Google search like "site:blowoutforums.com psa cert xxxxxxxxx" or use site:net54baseball.com instead and find the majority of the outed cards. Even using the first 5-6 numbers of the cert number would get you down to checking cards within the submission.