Quote:
Originally Posted by glynparson
There was as much if not more fraud 20-30 years ago as there is now. Much of it from the same group of clowns.
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Without a doubt Glyn. But back then you were more likely to come across these types at shows and in person. In those cases you would actually get to see and examine items in person, and thus be better able to discern if there were problems and issues. I know there were still mail order services, but it seems that most people back then stuck to the more well-known and respected dealers through the mail. Nowadays, with the internet and all, the scammers come looking for you, just look at the scams coming through our own B/S/T forum. And of course, Ebay is probably the biggest factor to really grow and expand the collecting hobby, and along with it, the scammers and thieves. The advent of TPGs and grading only added another twist or level to the kinds of fakes and scams that the would-be thieves would try to foist upon the collecting public. And with the expansion of those on the internet, those thieves and frauds can now reach a far larger number of people, literally around the world, and get paid using modern payment techniques that didn't exist back then. At least in the past, the scammers at a show trying to sell you a fake had to have an actual fake/counterfeit item to sell you. Nowadays with the internet, they can just steal an image from anywhere and pass it off as their own to unsuspecting marks.
That is more of what I was getting at. With the internet and the way more and more people just blindly accept buying virtually everything, sight unseen, online, it allows for more opportunities for crooks and fraudsters to take advantage of people. An old baby boomer like myself is automatically more skeptical from having been in this hobby for decades, and having seen and/or handled a lot of the fakes and counterfeits that can be out there. I still prefer the idea of going to a store to actually see and examine what I'm looking to buy, but since that concept and platform has been disappearing more and more in recent years, it just makes me all the more careful and overly skeptical when buying things in today's environment online.