skybolt

It's the worst possible scenario because this person could have dozens of auspicious clients, and there's no way to track all of them and their dealings.

My gut tells me that certain individuals that know who this person is are giving CGC a chance to make a statement first. If that does not happen in let's say 2 weeks, I guarantee the name will likely come out. That being said, I do realize that some unaware buyers could suffer collateral damage during this process.

As was mentioned in this thread before, there is no way that someone who's super meticulous about opening CGC cases and swapping books/labels without detection, would also take awful photos for his eBay listings (after all that work). Practically most of the photos had awful glare that showed his hand (in reflection) and made the book seem like it had multiple bends. This does not strike me as a person who masterminded the operation of consistently getting these books through CGC undetected.

Not to mention that the 4 day difference in grading the same book twice included a Saturday and Sunday, when CGC offices were closed on 2/25/2023 and 2/26/2023.

No worries Dave, we all appreciate everything you're doing and keeping us informed.

Not to mention that CGC's own data base shows all these discrepancies. If it was someone sitting at home changing labels to scam buyers on Ebay, how does this info show up in CGC's registry?

Not yet.

Thanks again for this info Comicwiz. The 4 day difference in grading each book makes it really suspicious. Talk about a fast moving operation where this guy has a book teleported to him from CGC after grading, does the whole business with swapping the inner wells / labels, teleporting the book back to CGC, and then somehow having CGC graders drop everything and regrade his book before other people who have $50k Walk-Thru books sitting there.

My apologies. That's why I needed to go back and check the podcast again, which again was very informative.

9.9newsstand definitely knows who he is and noted that he's taken a picture of him at a convention. I need to re-watch the podcast to find out when this was said.

9.9 newsstand mentioned he's taken pictures of him showing off newly CGC graded books at conventions in 2021.

I think CGC will just see this is as an opportunity to give out more 9.9 grades to get that craze going. Their new motto will be "when 9.8 goes bad, 9.9 is the new fad!".

This is like watching a police car chase where the perpetrator is driving 120 mph and police is going 25 mph. The guy is probably sitting back sipping tea and waiting for his eBay funds to kick in. In the meantime he's looking up some tours in the Caribbean.

Unfortunately, if this started in 2021, this is when CGC was desperate for new employees to keep up with the demand. Perhaps someone with data entry experience was hired, but had a shady background in software hacking. This is all conjecture at this point of course.

Honestly, I think this is the likely main reason CGC has not come out with a statement. They're trying to see how much this board can uncover first. My gut tells me their response will note negligence on the part of their re-holdering department. They'll note that staff should've checked the books more carefully if the slab came in with major damages that impacted the corners. The staff is going through proper training now to ensure this does not occur in the future. Any customers with books in question should send back to CGC for further evaluation. They will also ensure these were isolated cases and not rampant. Any issues with cert #'s or dates graded will be downplayed as system errors.

Perhaps the seller was confident he would find a lower graded Mark Jeweler copy of the ASM #194 and decided to create his submission months beforehand. That's all I could think of outside of any inside shenanigans.

Looking at my submissions over the past year, the cert #'s appear to be going up by date. I do know that different services have different cert #'s.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this guy's shill bids going back to 2011. So if someone creates a shill account, wins a book, leaves positive feedback, but then never pays for the books, I'm assuming the seller will keep the positive feedback and just relist the book. Perhaps he needed to build up all these accounts with positive reviews to make it seem legit. I don't know.

Or Goodfellas.

In addition to the re-holdered books, he also appears to have had some good fortunes with sending some green labeled books with missing MVS or inserts and getting a blue label via straight grading. I can't imagine CGC missing these major defects unless he was marrying inserts from other lower graded books.

I don't know. The more I look at this guy's past history, the more I get the sense he's not this world class master in opening and resealing slabs, marrying inserts consistently without detection or suspicion by CGC, etc. The reason I say this is that based on what Agamoto recently posted, the whole shill biding thing is really odd. Most of the ending bids are all over the place. Not sure what he was accomplishing there. Also, even his recent photos from listings from the past couple of years are really amateurish. Heck, in most of them there's this awful glare that almost looks like the books have major bends. Also, his hand and some of his face are showing up in practically every photo. I'm sorry to say this, but in my opinion I believe this guy had major help in pulling off something like this.

I'm not sure there's anything there. The 7.0 could just be a straight resub. The Avengers book has the same cut, but why would anyone add a date stamp? Plus, the bottom left corner does not look the same. I could be wrong though.

Not that it matters. No one is buying slabs from me these days anyway.

Sorry, the info was provided in another message I was replying to. The insider informtion I was referring to was 9.9newsstand hearing from this guy that a higher up CGC person was feeding him data about how many newsstand or Mark Jewelers copies (I can't remember which one) were on the census for certain books. You and I would not be privy to that info no matter what CGC service we were using.

It just seems odd that this insider info was given to this guy by a CGC employee (if he wasn't lying). It's not like someone can pay for a higher level of service to receive this info. f there is no such service then no one should receive this info.