Posted By:
AnonymousI have only been hanging around here a short time and have already heard a boatload of bad things about this guy.
I did check on a bunch of his auctions and who is bidding on his stuff. It appears that it is the same 3-4 people that run up the price all time. It's amazing to see to peole with a 50 feedback rating with 200+ feddbacks, almost all from danbuzz or other people that have bid on his auction. They all seem to come from roughly the same geographic area, so that, along with all the cross bidding on items sure makes seem like they are shill bidding. And yes, he still has to pay final price fees even if no action sale of the card took place.
It's very possible that what is going on is that they are using to 'auctions' to justify sales prices in thier stores. This wouldn't be the first time a scam like that has been run. When then internet was only ftp protocol and unenet groups I knew several dealers that would have friends post 'buy' ads on the usenet groups, never actually buying anything and then justify the price they were charging by saying "hey look, there on people on the internet willing to pay this much for this card."
Another variation on this from the 80s was full page ads offering to pay top dollar for certain cards. When you went to thier table at a show, they would tell you that they had already bought as many cards as they wanted. Then a few issues later they were selling these cards based on the supposed buy price they were offering. The gimmick was that they had already bought huge collection of the cards they supposedly wanted and used the buy ad soley to create an artificial price. The grossest example of this I experienced was when one of these dealers was 'buying' high grade Wheaties cards. I walked up to his table with every complete set from 1936-9 on the box, not the just the card, and was told that he was not interested since he already bought all the Wheaties cards that he wanted. Gimmie a break, how many complte boxes of these still exist?
Jay
I like to sit outside, drink beer and yell at people. If I did this at home I would be arrested, so I go to baseball games and fit right in.