Which alleged practice concerns you the most?
 

1. Card alteration.
2. Grading company incompetence.
3. Shill bidding and related practices (e.g. reporting cards as sold that didn't sell).
4. Fake or misrepresented autographs and memorabilia.
5. Failure to pay consignors.
6. It's a sunny day, at least here in the East, and everything is great.

7. Great guys

Hands down.......
 

Failure to pay consignors. The rest of the points are all speculative and one can only assume what is going on. When a person consigns goods and are owed 75,000 then that is a fact so when they are not paid there is no grey area or misunderstanding they are just getting screwed.

1. I can spot doctored cards in the areas I collect so this is not a major issue for me.

2. In my opinion, on vintage cards SGC is very good and PSA is not. I just take that as a given.

3. I never bid more than I am happy to pay for a lot so this does not annoy me much.

4. Although I have been stung by fake memorabilia in the past (thanks Len) I think that if you cannot pick out fakes you only have yourself to blame.

5. This bothers me a lot. While collectors buy, and it is their responsibility to know what they are buying, non-collectors often sell. An example is the widow mentioned in a previous post. There is no, no excuse for ripping off these people. To me this is by far the worst offense.

Easy...
1 through 5.

Joshua

1, 3, 4, and 5 are all forms of theft. Depending on the magnitude of the theft, anyone of them could be a major crime. I suppose that 4 and 5 are the ones that are hardest for the average collector to protect against and avoid.

Ranked in order from worst to least bad, with reasons


3. Shill bidding and related practices (e.g. reporting cards as sold that didn't sell). (As Marshall said, hard to prove, but if you can prove, a sign of complete lack of integrity.)

5. Failure to pay consignors. (A death sentence for an auction house, but could, possibly, be caused by factors harder to control by the auction house.)

4. Fake or misrepresented autographs and memorabilia. (I have never trusted any autographs, so for me, easy to avoid.)

1. Card alteration. (Sometimes hard to define. Impossible to accept once you do. Easier to spot, especially if the grading companies are doing their jobs well.)

2. Grading company incompetence. (Eventually, market forces will weed out the bad ones.)

6. It's a sunny day, at least here in the East, and everything is great. (I live in Texas. Every day is sunny, and unfortunately, 98 degrees.)

I've read this line of reasoning many times, and I can only imagine the chuckles it prompts from unscrupulous auctioneers who view this board.

If I'm willing (heck, even happy) to pay $1,000 for a card and I enter that amount as a ceiling or maximum bid, that doesn't give the auctioneer the right to shill the item to that amount. If the next-highest bid is $500, then I should pay the lowest amount that tops that bid as per the auction rules.

It's no wonder so many auctions are crooked; we collectors seem to invite getting ripped off.

To follow up with what Rob just wrote, this line also is particularly ridiculous (and legally incorrect). So if a fraudster tries to sell you, let's say, a fake Mickey Cochrane game worn jersey, and if you can't discern that it's a fake, only you are at fault? You can't blame the criminal who just tried to steal your money? No wonder our hobby is rife with criminals -- the victims refuse to blame the very people who are defrauding them!

My Take
 

Failure to pay consignors

Com'on guys - handle these issues privately. :)

In case it wasn't clear - I think all this stuff should be publicly discussed and exposed.

To answer my own question, in order worst to least concerning.
1. Card alteration.
2. Grading company incompetence. To me this is bound up with card alteration -- I believe a staggeringly high number of altered cards (by most people's definition) have made their way into holders with number grades.
3. Failure to pay.
4. Shill bidding.
5. Fake memorabilia, only b/c I don't collect, if I did would be right up there with card alteration.

EDIT TO ADD Of course these categories are not mutually exclusive. I imagine there have been many occasions when someone was shill bid on an altered card that a grading company incompetently slabbed.

One more thing...
 

The reason failure to pay consignors stands out to me is very simple. No matter the subject matter whether it be cards,antiques,paintings and so forth if consignors do not get paid then there is simply no great stuff to bid on.

For example.....if a guy consigns a 50,000 card and does not get paid then he will generally file a lawsuit and then says to himself well F&^K this and never for any reason consign a high dollar card hence the only way to get great cards is through estates and that is tough. Trust me we all know who hustles in the game and provides great things to bid on for the high end collectors, burn them a few times and cards get locked up and sold privately.

Schill bidding is so hard to prove.......hmmmmm........look how long the feds have been looking at Mastro and tah-dah nothing but drama and nobody is locked up or sentenced. The feds will never prove it and it just leaves a negative cloud over the hobby.

1-4 has been going on for so long you kind of expect it. It's lost its ability to shock or surprise.

But #5, failure to pay consignors, is completely off the charts. So that one gets my vote.

The first 3 relate to decisions we can make as collectors and the outcome is somewhat within your control. Not paying a consignor is a totally different concept. I guess shill bidding also fits into a category of situations that are not within your control as well. So my vote goes to 3 & 5.

1 (card altering) is not a problem if 2 (grading company incompetence) were not an even larger issue. The destruction associated with collectors and authorities recognizing grading company incompetence (intentional or accidental) has the potential to be more devastating to the hobby than any other problem that plagues the business. There is nothing remotely close posing a threat of this magnitude.

Were the grading companies to collapse and the hobby survived, card altering should be the practice that should be of the greatest concern to collectors. In my opinion, many collectors (the majority) could not tell if a card were altered given the quality of the work that is being performed these days.

for me personally
 

Since the question was posed as it being for us personally I will answer it that way. In order of importance....

2. If the grading companies don't catch things then that would screw me over big time, if I didn't catch something. #1 becomes moot if they do their job well.

3. Shill bidding would be a big problem for me as I bid in most auctions and it is a concern if there is not a legit bidder running me up. Even if I don't put in a max, the person bidding me up could be a shill or the consignor or a bogus bidder of some kind. That would be a big problem for me.

I don't really collect autos or memorabilia so it's not a problem for me. Since I have an auction company I really don't consign too much so that is not a worry. That issue would rise to the top if I were a collector/seller/buyer otherwise.

It's raining here in St.Louis today...but I will be in Kansas City tomorrow so hopefully it will be nicer there......

As far as taking these kinds of questions to private emails I would politely disagree. My belief has always been the more communication about everything the better.....regards

My votes....
 

My #1 vote would be fake autographs/memorabilia. You are paying for something that is absolutely worthless and don't know it. It's also the most prevelant problem in the hobby today.

After that, my #2 is altered cards only because they have slightly more value than something that is totally fake and again you most likely don't know that its been altered.

#3 is mis-grading because it contributes a lot to the previous two issues.

#4 is shill bidding. Typically, the victim probably pays 10% to 30% more than he should of.

#5 - being stiffed on your consignment is bad, but in the big picture it is a drop in the bucket compared to the other fraud in the hobby and at least you know you've been victimized.

I couldn't care less about autographs, shill bidding, failure to pay consignors (other than me), memorabilia, or sunshine. Alterations, when done maliciously, deserve a trip way down under, but I've still got my eyesight, so they don't bother me.

I think the biggest annoyance are those few people who consistently perpetrate fraud and live to see another day in the hobby. That can be buyers, sellers, auction houses, or anyone else.

Bill

Can I amend my response to say that I feel so inadequate to find that I have been swimming in a sea of mediocrity all these years?

ditto

In my case it would be shill bidding and related practices. I think shill bidding has the biggest negative impact on the hobby since it artificially inflates values, and hurts both buyers and sellers.

Each of the other things are, in my opinion, bad. However, each is also somewhat mitigated by knowledge. The more I know about a given issue, or about the hobby in general, the less likely I am to be victimized by any of those things. And while I've certainly encountered each of them (except #5), I think it's #3 that I can protect myself against the LEAST.

-Al

Hallelujah, Al !!!
 

I was going to write that until I saw your post at the end...

Shill bidding gets my vote.

Other alleged practices which concern me
 

I would add that "too many great guys in the hobby" is probably a bit troubling to me. If there were any more "great guys" I might go bankrupt. Also, not enough fake Mickey Cochrane jerseys.

I would like to add another category to the list which needs to be closely monitored at all times.

1) COMPUTER HACKING from other members! Anyone who needs to break in to another member’s computer is complete and utter loser!!! You know who you are:)

Brad, yes, you reminded me of another one: too many things going on in the grassy knoll part of the hobby.