Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
How many people do you think stopped bidding in Legendary after all the Mastro/Allen stuff came out? My guess is not many, even among their harshest critics, as has been acknowledged on this Board in fact. Not making a judgment about that, just pointing out that stuff is what rules. Look at all the insinuations of shill bidding against certain major online ebay sellers. Their dominance just keeps on increasing.
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The sort of interesting thing about that, at least from my perspective, was the fact that I wondered if bidding in Mastro/Allen after the indictments wasn't much safer than before. I actually talked to my brother about that at the time. My thinking was that even they wouldn't be so brazen, bold, stupid, whatever descriptive term you want to use, when they were under indictment and being heavily scrutinized by the feds, as to shill the cards at that point. It wasn't that I didn't think they were cheaters and fraudsters, because I absolutely did, but I thought that they would be running the cleanest auctions ever at that point because they were already under indictment.
I tested this theory one time, in one auction, and threw in a couple of what I considered to be fairly low max bids on the last day. Surprisingly, I actually won both of the cards I had bid on, both below the max bid price, one at a really good price. That doesn't mean that I wasn't shilled by any means, but I will say that I was really surprised by how little I ended up paying for cards. I view it as somewhat of an interesting character study about how greed and fraud works when the feds have you and are far up your ass.