Quote:
Originally Posted by bnorth
How would a product purchased from the company making them be considered stolen goods by any stretch of the immigration? People buying directly has never been any kind of secret. I have personally done it.
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Ben,
A long while back, I had a softball/bowling buddy who did some work for a local guy known to be in the card and autograph "business". He even had a small collectibles store going for a while as well, till the IRS caught up to him and shut his a$$ down, and I'd oftentimes visit with my friend while he was working there. He told me about all the product his boss seemed to be able to get his hands on, which he then pushed like crazy. Then one day my friend told me how he accompanied his boss on a run in a U-Haul type panel truck, to meet up with another similar truck at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Apparently the other truck was coming from a different friend of the boss, who was connected at Topps. It was loaded with tons of product cases, with most all of them being open and way overloaded with whatever products they were supposed to contain. My friend was along to help unload everything from the truck they met, into the truck they then brought back to Cleveland. My friend's boss also told him how his connection got it so the overloaded boxes/cases were all treated as single cases after all, so the overloaded stuff were all "free" extras to him. The "meeting at a rest stop on the PA Turnpike" told me everything I needed to know about the overall legality of that situation. And apparently his boss did these kind of "secret" exchanges more than just this one single time.
This may be a somewhat similar situation as to what this Willjaimet poster is describing in a sort of obscure way. Or it may just be the use of the word 'stolen" is a little inaccurate or not properly describing the situation. The fact that the poster says he was able to buy all kinds of 1/1 cards from a single source would seem to indicate there was at least a conspiracy to dupe the public into thinking that cards advertised as being inserted into particular products never were. I think the more appropriate word in that case may be "fraud". And if someone on the inside of a card company was purposely seeing to it that those manufactured rarities were not being inserted into packs as they were supposed to be, whether they then stole them from the card company to separately sell and profit for themself, or the card company itself was the one purposely doing it and directly profiting from the separate sale of those 1/1 cards, it is clearly wrong either way and points to a potential criminal type of conspiracy. So, the party Willjaimet was dealing with may or may not have actually been a criminal dealing in known stolen goods, he may have just been a party to defrauding the public. And lastly, the party that Willjaimet described as offering him all these 1/1/ cards, was he actually part of the group/company that was producing these cards in the first place, or merely a pawn or other player in the distribution of them that the card producing company worked with? Because if he wasn't an actual employee/formal representative of the card company, then this was clearly not any kind of a "direct sale". I do not know any more than you. Just throwing out some additional thoughts and observations.