Article about Collecting and Fraud in the Hobby

[G1911]

That PWCC’s trimming and fraud ring did NOT exist is the conspiracy theory, the one that flies in the face of mountains of evidence. Finally we get to the actual point, pretending PWCC is innocent and the thousands of provably trimmed cards from his buddy Gary and others, many of which Brent himself bought before trimming, are a frame up.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

That PWCC’s trimming and fraud ring did NOT exist is the conspiracy theory, the one that flies in the face of mountains of evidence. Finally we get to the actual point, pretending PWCC is innocent and the thousands of provably trimmed cards from his buddy Gary and others, many of which Brent himself bought before trimming, are a frame up.

As I have posted countless times, Brent admitted, both in emails and conversations, to knowing what Gary does. They had a decades long partnership dating way back to when Brent was just a kid in Northern California with the ID huigenser and Gary was looking for someone to sell his cards on ebay. Just ignore Travis he is willfully clueless at this point and knows nothing about the history here. I am done arguing with someone who thinks the earth is flat.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

As I have posted countless times, Brent admitted, both in emails and conversations, to knowing what Gary does. They had a decades long partnership dating way back to when Brent was just a kid in Northern California with the ID huigenser and Gary was looking for someone to sell his cards on ebay. Just ignore Travis he is willfully clueless at this point and knows nothing about the history here. I am done arguing with someone who thinks the earth is flat.

I'm not saying that these things did not happened. What I question is the extent to which we actually know what many think we know. Much of what is believed to be true from BODA and crew has been built on top of unproven assumptions (some of which are demonstrably faulty). I'm not talking about the cards or alterations themselves. Most of the cards they posted were clear examples of cards that have indeed been trimmed. I'm talking about the logic they use in tying the various parties involved to each other and to those sales.

I have posted this elsewhere before, but eBay's masked user ID algorithm randomizes your masked ID. BODA's method of tying sales to particular users is flawed. Saying they know a card was purchased by Moser because the buyer ID is listed as 'm***1' is a GIANT assumption. I web scraped all of PWCC's and Probstein's eBay feedback profiles and created a database of all the different user IDs that show up there (if anyone wants the data, send me a PM, I'd be happy to share it). There are countless disparate 'm***1' masked eBay IDs buying cards on eBay. In addition, the username 'garymoser123' would have 132 different permutations that eBay uses at random for their purchases (12 Permute 2 = 132). I believe at one point in time, they did use permutations of the characters in usernames for this (however, as noted below, at some point in time, at least 3+ years ago, they switched to using completely random characters for everyone). Moser purchases a card and it shows as 'm***1' today, but it's 'g***e' tomorrow and '2***y' the next day. If you don't believe me, just go to eBay and log out, then look up your own eBay purchases and see what masked IDs eBay lists you as. You'll have a different masked buyer ID for each purchase. I demonstrated this fact in another thread here regarding a shill bidding operation that I uncovered a while back (here's the link to that thread if you care to read about it: https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?p=2132185). The relevant portion of those posts is that the shill bidding account I found had the numerous masked eBay IDs that all pointed to the same user account ('rywag5421') when you clicked on them (note that the revealed characters in the masked ID aren't even always present in the ID itself - in other words, they are completely random characters):
y***y (357)
6***r (357)
8***0 (357)
r***g (357)
1***4 (357)
5***1 (357)
3***w (357)
1***g (357)
a***6 (357)
5***9 (357)
4***w (357)
0***4 (357)
1***1 (357)
4***a (357)
4***y (357)
0***1 (357)
r***y (357)
y***9 (357)
1***0 (357)
5***8 (357)
8***w (357)
5***2 (357)
3***a (357)
g***4 (357)
g***2 (357)
9***1 (357)
1***y (357)

If we knew the feedback scores along with those masked IDs, that could be helpful, but most of the purchases BODA digs up were from years ago and are taken from VCP, which stores the buyers' masked eBay IDs from the corresponding sales on their website. BODA finds a trimmed card, looks up the masked IDs, then starts connecting the dots. Then they post their "findings" and it just builds and builds. Mountains of evidence built on top of completely random eBay user IDs. If you don't see how this is problematic, then I can't help you. Perhaps at one point in time eBay's masking algorithm used to be less random, using only characters from the actual user ID instead of truly random characters, but even if that were true (which it most definitely has not been true since at least the time that this case was broken wide open by BODA) then we still would have far too many disparate users with the same masked IDs to be able to narrow them down without the feedback scores, which VCP does not track.

Here's what we know: thousands of trimmed cards have been sold/laundered through PWCC over the years. We know that Brent accepted consignments from Gary for a long time until he severed that relationship due to blowback (or I accept that to be true rather). But everything you think you know about which cards were bought by whom, prior to them being trimmed, is all built on the demonstrably false assumption that eBay buyer ID 'x***y' = eBayUserXYZ. And all of these accusations about Brent having bought some specific card and then Moser having trimmed it on his behalf and then resold it through PWCC are built on top of these faulty assumptions of tying random eBay IDs together in some network graph that doesn't actually exist. It reminds me of how schizophrenia often gets portrayed in movies by showing these massive network graphs with photos and news clippings all strung together with push pins and strings on walls.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that EVERYTHING they've uncovered is completely random nonsense. Some of it is not. There are other ways to tie some of this stuff together, and they've definitely uncovered stuff that is worth looking into further. But MUCH of what BODA and everyone who follows those threads believe to be true is in fact built upon truly random masked eBay IDs. This is one of the main reasons that I dismiss the majority of accusations about certain individuals that stem from those threads, and why I don't take people at their word when they tell me what they think I *should* know from what BODA has "uncovered".

This is why I say I will wait for the results of the actual investigation from the actual detectives. The FBI can get their hands on the real underlying data behind all of these transactions, not just some random masked user IDs. Then they can begin to sort out who actually did what. But without this data, all we have are conspiracy theories. Sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. But I need better evidence than "this card was bought by 'b***h' which means Brent Huigens bought it and we know he had Gary Moser trim it because this other card was bought by 'g***m' and as you can see, it was trimmed, and that's Gary Moser's masked eBay ID, and those two serial numbers are only 53 digits apart, so we know Brent bought cards for Gary to trim!" Note, this isn't a strawman depiction of the arguments made in those threads. This is quite literally how many of the arguments/connections are presented by BODA. Such arguments are complete and utter nonsense without the actual user IDs behind those completely random masked IDs.