Probstein video about trimmed cards

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by gunboat82

Can you give concrete examples of cards that are worth more trimmed than left alone? If we make the issue less abstract, then maybe we can find some common ground.

I'm operating from the assumption that people who know that a card is trimmed and fail to disclose it are doing so because they see financial value in keeping others in the dark. If trimming the card didn't negatively affect its market, then there would be no logical reason to keep it a secret.

If you're suggesting that some trimming "does not devalue a card whatsoever" because people who are none the wiser pay top dollar, then I think we're simply at opposite ends of the ethical spectrum. The relevant question for me isn't whether the money is there given the state of the hobby as it stands, where ignorance is bliss, but rather whether the same money would still be there if the cards were sold as "Authentic Altered," rather than stuck in slabs with numeric grades.

There is that T206 Wagner that started it all.

[gunboat82]

Originally Posted by bnorth

There is that T206 Wagner that started it all.

Yeah. I wonder if 99 out of 100 people on the street would say Mastro was railroaded. If so, God help us.

[Peter_Spaeth]

To put some legal context on this, selling an item in interstate commerce knowing a material fact has been misrepresented or omitted certainly can be mail fraud and/or wire fraud. Travis' point, essentially, is that we have reached the point where the fact that a slabbed card is trimmed is no longer material. Incredibly, and sadly, he may be right. The flip is the commodity and the slab sanitizes.

[gunboat82]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

To put some legal context on this, selling an item in interstate commerce knowing a material fact has been misrepresented or omitted certainly can be mail fraud and/or wire fraud. Travis' point, essentially, is that we have reached the point where the fact that a slabbed card is trimmed is no longer material. Incredibly, and sadly, he may be right. The flip is the commodity and the slab sanitizes.

This is fair, but I think of the slabbed card as "laundered money" in this context.

If an auction house has no reason to suspect that the consignor is laundering trimmed cards through a third-party grader, then I wouldn't hold the auction house accountable.

If an auction house is doing business with a known trimmer, we're getting into an ethical gray area, but there's too much uncertainty to hold the auction house accountable for individual listings.

If an auction house is knowingly taking trimmed cards that were slabbed as unaltered, then they're essentially just fencing fraudulent goods.

I don't think the slabs make trimming an immaterial fact; I think they just make it much harder to detect. I still think it's worthwhile to identify altered cards when possible and to pass that information along to consumers. We're probably just talking past each other, but Travis' "hobby clowns" reference gave me the impression that he sees Probstein and others as the real victims now that they've successfully flooded the market with secretly altered cards, and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by gunboat82

This is fair, but I think of the slabbed card as "laundered money" in this context.

If an auction house has no reason to suspect that the consignor is laundering trimmed cards through a third-party grader, then I wouldn't hold the auction house accountable.

If an auction house is doing business with a known trimmer, we're getting into an ethical gray area, but there's too much uncertainty to hold the auction house accountable for individual listings.

If an auction house is knowingly taking trimmed cards that were slabbed as unaltered, then they're essentially just fencing fraudulent goods.

I don't think the slabs make trimming an immaterial fact; I think they just make it much harder to detect. I still think it's worthwhile to identify altered cards when possible and to pass that information along to consumers. We're probably just talking past each other, but Travis' "hobby clowns" reference gave me the impression that he sees Probstein and others as the real victims now that they've successfully flooded the market with secretly altered cards, and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Nobody objects to alteration as much as I do, or tried as hard to publicly make the case that knowingly selling trimmed cards is criminal, but based on what I see in terms of people not caring and prices not being affected, I'm not so sure any more about the materiality element.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by gunboat82

This is fair, but I think of the slabbed card as "laundered money" in this context.

Perhaps that's a fair way to view a botched-up card that is clearly trimmed and passed through grading because the grader just finished a line of coke in the bathroom prior to examining it, but is it really "laundered money" though if the card can be cracked out and resubmitted 100 times having passed grading each time because it doesn't actually bear any evidence of trimming?

This is the problem we're up against. Many of these cards that were identified as trimmed by BODA were reexamined by the best graders in the world, and those graders still couldn't find any physical evidence of trimming. Yes, I know you can write this off as a conspiracy and claim that it's just an obvious conflict of interest, but you'd be a fool to think that sufficiently explains away the problem. A card can indeed be trimmed and yet be completely indistinguishable from one with a factory-cut edge. This fact gets overlooked, or worse, rejected by too many people in this hobby. Yet it is the single most important truth in the entire discussion when trying to come up with solutions.

Originally Posted by gunboat82

Travis' "hobby clowns" reference gave me the impression that he sees Probstein and others as the real victims now that they've successfully flooded the market with secretly altered cards, and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm defending businesses like Probstein's because it's not their responsibility to police this stuff. That would be like expecting a pawn shop to have to scour the web for hours every day, checking to see if a set of golf clubs that someone brought into their shop may have been stolen property. The hobby clowns are barking up the wrong trees. Constantly. SCR is the worst.

[Peter_Spaeth]

The irony. PSA, whose very premise (the stated one anyhow) was to catch card doctoring, is a major player in legitimizing card doctoring. Probably the most important one. It's almost funny.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

To put some legal context on this, selling an item in interstate commerce knowing a material fact has been misrepresented or omitted certainly can be mail fraud and/or wire fraud. Travis' point, essentially, is that we have reached the point where the fact that a slabbed card is trimmed is no longer material. Incredibly, and sadly, he may be right. The flip is the commodity and the slab sanitizes.

Yes, precisely. The market doesn't care whether or not a card is trimmed. The market only cares whether or not a card is labeled as trimmed by a TPG.

And to take that a step further, a raw card's value is determined by its ability to pass through grading, or more specifically, by whether or not it bears evidence of having been trimmed, not by whether or not it actually has been.

Billy Bob can sell you a raw card at a steep discount because he believes it has been trimmed. After all, the person he bought it from told him so. Billy Bob keeps good notes and he cares about his integrity. He goes to church on Sundays AND Wednesdays. But if you resell that card, you have no obligation whatsoever to pass that information along after having it graded by a TPG. Billy Bob's opinion is irrelevant. The market doesn't care what he thinks.

Also, if you think the card is less valuable because you sold it below comps after you attached a note to it that read "the guy I bought this from told me it was trimmed", despite the PSA 9 label suggesting otherwise, you'd be wrong. All you did was sell the buyer a full value PSA 9 card at a discount, effectively handing him free money by shooting yourself in the foot. You might reason that your integrity is on the line. Others might argue that it's just your ignorance on display and that you're virtue signaling and paying off someone else so you can feel better about yourself. Again, the market doesn't care. The market is a cold beast.

[G1911]

Let's say we have 2 copies of the same card in the same condition, except that 1 is trimmed and 1 is not. They are sold honestly; with the small trimmed strip included alongside the rest of the card. We all know which one is worth more and will sell for more.

A trimmed card is only as valuable as an untrimmed card if a grading company doesn't catch it or corruptly grades it anyway and there is a perception that the card is unaltered or many people will believe it to be and thus can be suckered into paying more for it when the owner flips it.

If I make a fake diamond and sneak my fake past an expert, it's still a fake that is worth less and I commit fraud if I sell it as original, because that is a material fact I am hiding to deceive a buyer and make more money. We don't say it is not fraud because the fraud was successful and an alleged expert was tricked. I can't think of an example where the success of a fraud scheme makes it not fraud. Tricking a corporation, or their complicity in the scheme, does not make something not fraud.

I understand we have a great number of hobbyists that love fraud (at least when committed by themselves or the people they like), but this makes no sense at all.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

Let's say we have 2 copies of the same card in the same condition, except that 1 is trimmed and 1 is not. They are sold honestly; with the small trimmed strip included alongside the rest of the card. We all know which one is worth more and will sell for more.

A trimmed card is only as valuable as an untrimmed card if a grading company doesn't catch it or corruptly grades it anyway and there is a perception that the card is unaltered or many people will believe it to be and thus can be suckered into paying more for it when the owner flips it.

If I make a fake diamond and sneak my fake past an expert, it's still a fake that is worth less and I commit fraud if I sell it as original, because that is a material fact I am hiding to deceive a buyer and make more money. We don't say it is not fraud because the fraud was successful and an alleged expert was tricked. I can't think of an example where the success of a fraud scheme makes it not fraud. Tricking a corporation, or their complicity in the scheme, does not make something not fraud.

I understand we have a great number of hobbyists that love fraud (at least when committed by themselves or the people they like), but this makes no sense at all.

But suppose people don't care if it's fake, only what it looks like? Is it still material? Don't fight the hypothetical, assume my facts. Isn't that the analogy here at least to how many collectors now think? I would bet my life you could prove to many set registrants they had fake cards (altered anyhow) and they would not get rid of them, but would keep them because what matters to them is the registry ranking.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

But suppose people don't care if it's fake, only what it looks like? Is it still material? Don't fight the hypothetical, assume my facts. Isn't that the analogy here at least to how many collectors now think? I would bet my life you could prove to many set registrants they had fake cards and they would not get rid of them, but would keep them because what matters to them is the registry ranking.

This is why I started at the beginning and used the example of an honestly listed card and the same card but untrimmed, both posted honestly and fully. Do we seriously dispute that the untrimmed one will sell for more and he seems a more valuable? No? Then we know the untrimmed example is worth more and we know exactly why nobody trimming cards is selling these cards as trimmed.

If the situation was completely different, then the conclusions would be completely different.

They only have the same value, as I said, if a company that people have outsourced their thinking too says it does because they are certifying it isn’t altered and is in Mint or Near Mint or whatever grade above an authentic altered that you’d like for the example. That is, if there is corruption or the grader is tricked. Again, I cannot think of an example where an alteration deceiving an authenticator or expert makes it no longer fraud.

The registry collector may be fine with it - because and only because their circle and buyer market also outsources their thinking to this corporation that has certified the card is just fine and believe the false certification. .

Successfully getting a dishonest item by an expert does not mean that it is not fraud. If succeeding in the crime for some time before someone catches it is grounds for it not bringing a crime, we better go open the floodgates. I’m not seeing any logical way this isn’t fraud as neither justifications makes any sense.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by G1911

Let's say we have 2 copies of the same card in the same condition, except that 1 is trimmed and 1 is not. They are sold honestly; with the small trimmed strip included alongside the rest of the card. We all know which one is worth more and will sell for more.

A trimmed card is only as valuable as an untrimmed card if a grading company doesn't catch it or corruptly grades it anyway and there is a perception that the card is unaltered or many people will believe it to be and thus can be suckered into paying more for it when the owner flips it.

You're still overlooking the most important aspect though. Is the trimmed card identifiable as such? Does it bear evidence of trimming? The card itself. Not some piece of paper shaving sitting next to it, not some eyewitness account of someone claiming they saw it happen, not even a signed confession. The only thing that matters with respect to the market value of the card is whether or not it presents as trimmed.

Originally Posted by G1911

If I make a fake diamond and sneak my fake past an expert, it's still a fake that is worth less and I commit fraud if I sell it as original, because that is a material fact I am hiding to deceive a buyer and make more money. We don't say it is not fraud because the fraud was successful and an alleged expert was tricked. I can't think of an example where the success of a fraud scheme makes it not fraud. Tricking a corporation, or their complicity in the scheme, does not make something not fraud.

This isn't even remotely analogous to the topic of trimmed cards. There is a world of difference between a trimmed card and a counterfeit card.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Snowman

You're still overlooking the most important aspect though. Is the trimmed card identifiable as such? Does it bear evidence of trimming? The card itself. Not some piece of paper shaving sitting next to it, not some eyewitness account of someone claiming they saw it happen, not even a signed confession. The only thing that matters with respect to the market value of the card is whether or not it presents as trimmed.



This isn't even remotely analogous to the topic of trimmed cards. There is a world of difference between a trimmed card and a counterfeit card.

Your long stated position that if PSA lets it by the card doesn’t bear evidence of trimming and thus it isn’t trimmed ins by meaningful sense because they missed it sophistry of the first order. You just go with whatever setup excuses fraud.

The analogy is a material fact being dishonestly presented. Change it to any exact setup you would like.