My Thoughts on the CGC Scammer. 

UPDATE! Since posting this issue CGC has issued a statement! full investigation is underway and they are treating it with the utmost seriousness. They've tracced it to seemingly ONE individual who acted and affected over a hundred slabs. Go get him!

Rick over at Immaculate Comics may have figured out how it was done. The scammer may have used a heat gun to soften and loosen a bottom corner post which allows the slab to simply separate, swap out the books, and then glue the corner post back together again.

A couple quick thoughts: 1. Has been mentioned by many that CGC could solve/prevent future issues like this if they only took the time to marry the inner well, label and case by laser engraving the Cert # on all three; 2. I'm really curious to see if this "scandal" in some way benefits CBCS - does the collecting market rethink how we value CGC vs. CBCS? Thanks for the concise and direct video!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this! And thank you so very much for the mention! Much love!!

Thanks for the update, James. And thanks for pointing out that it wasn't CGC doing the scamming. I've seen several videos that, at least in their title , make it sound like CGC was the ones doing the scamming. Fortunately, I've never understood why there is such a price hike for newstand or Mark jewlers insert variants, so not exactly affecting me. But i do hate a con man almost worse than any other nonviolent crime. Not only does the victim get ripped off, but then they are made to feel like they should have known better.

Thank you for not being a RU-vid drama queen and lets get this legal money.

Thanks for your input. The community values your opinion

Now that CGC has made a statement and has acknowledged they are aware of the one noted individual scamming them and buyers, it would behoove them to analyze the re-holdering data for that fraudulent seller and see if there are other sellers with a similar re-holdering pattern. I suspect that won't happen though unless another community member is able to unearth a specific seller doing the same thing. So, for now, we are just supposed to believe it was just that one guy. Doubtful.

Why does CGC get off easy while PGX gets a bad rap? CGC has done more sketchy sh*t than all the comic grading companies.

Grading companies could use some type of tamper proof tape or something that makes it obvious that a slab has been messed with and if they receive a slab with the tamper item tripped, they should require a re-grade and not just a re-holder

CGC said that “hundreds” of slabs may be impacted.

Great point on letting people know that CGC is a victim in this as well!

Makes me glad i collect just raw books.

I dont think it was one person. I think they are trying to cover their ass so it dosent look worse than it already is. If one person did it , many have done it

I find it interesting that CGC said “the trust that we have built with our community sometimes makes us a target of bad actors.” So, it looks like they are blaming the trust that “they have built” as the problem; not the flaws that have been exposed with their reholdering and relabeling services. If they cared more about their customers and the integrity of their product than they cared about all of that easy reslabbing and relabeling money, these incidents would not have ever occurred.

The detective skills 🕵️‍♀️ from the community were on point. 👌

One of three things it’s gotta be. 1. Inside job. 2. Outside job with inside help to new cases. 3. Outside job that the individual(s) have incredible skills on how to manipulate the cgc cases. Acrylic welding isn’t that hard to do and supplies are easily available and if you’ve done it enough, it’s quite easy.

This CGC slab scam and the counterfeiting that has been getting really good too, and as values of books go up, the more this will be attempted. Honestly it’s making me less and less interested in buying higher priced books and reinforcing my current collecting strategies of getting the stories, whether through facsimiles or regular issues.

Thanks for taking the time to do this video man! Awesome that CGC is taking it so seriously, I think all we wanted was an answer from them. Cheers! 🎉

Thank you for having a great Channel. Keep doing great contents. See you next year. Wish you all the best were you in your Channel. And happy new year 🎉

My guess is whatever the response, the cost of CGC is going up somehow. My other guess is we will never know the full story unless the scammer is an insider. If it's an outsider - telling how the scam works would just open up every already-graded book to the same risk of fraud.

The reality is that grading companies rely on us trusting that what's on the label is really what has been slabbed. Without opening the slab and going through the comic page by page however, a buyer cannot be 100% certain, although obviously, doing so negates the whole grading process. My predictions: CGC will find a scapegoat, the company will weasel out of compensation and none will ever be paid to victims of the scammer and the company will deny responsibility or minimise it to the point where it's negligible. Quite possibly they'll even hire the scammer to join their quality control division in the same way that hackers are hired by the business they hack to join the anti-hacking team. Cynical? Sure, but CGC is hardly a model of outstanding corporate ethics.

The perp is also facing wire fraud charges. That brings in the FBI.

Yeah this sucks for people buying this books and finding them to be a scam. I hope that the people responsible are caught and taken care of and we keep the comic book community as pure as we can.

Love the antique cash register. Immaculate comics gave a demo as the how it was done.

Funny, CGC does not guarantee really anything like grades or restoration. Why grade books through CGC? The issue at hand is that during re-holder they probably didn’t have two people inspect the book ensuring the book was authentic.They need to get rid of the re-holder process. What do you think?

Why couldn’t you just replace it with a fake? Or a facsmile? I guarantee CGC wasn’t checking these books thorough enough or else that would have caught this BS sooner. I bet this wasn’t the only guy who figure out how to do this as well.

I like how you end that with a CBCS submission lol😂

Pretty sure its not difficult to buy those plastic cases.and printing a fake cgc lable would be childs play.a small initial investment can pay off with first sale!👍🤷🏼‍♂️

I dont think CGC cares. Remember this is the same company that sent employees home with customers books to grade during the pandemic.

I doubt it's just one person. I believe it's also an inside job assistance.

we are seeing the end of CGC .....

I've wondered about the youtuber (don't recall name) whose whole channel is chemically cleaning books and sending them in for grading to show he can get a blue label instead of a "cleaned".

New CGC-style cases can be bought online for $4 or $5 each... the sonic welders are available for around $1000.

Thanks for spelling adaptation correctly even though I’ve heard adaption which drives me nuts. Thanks for elevating. Sad that cgcs lapses made them unwitting coconspirators

Of course CGC finally made a statement just earlier this morning.

My solution (which may be a bit of a band-aid solution) is to offer grader's notes on every single submission. Not only would this partially solve this issue, but they wouldn't have to spend an insane amount redesigning the slabbing process and they'd probably gain some good-will from an already annoyed userbase. Even if they raised the price $5, I'd be totally OK with that.

Glad you pointed out that the company also got scammed as their reputation is impacted as well. Great video! I watch your comics videos and get good information every time.

This is my question: how are they going to prove the person did it? If they don't have direct evidence then he's just going to get away with it.

I didn’t know anything about this. How did this get found out? If they are slabbed.

What's the name of this "one" person, ebay store, or LCS that's involved with this scam?

This kills the slab market because theres no transparency ariund which books are legit lol process failure by CGC don't defend them they need to specify how process will be fixed and how current slabs can be address as legit through their slab lookup function. I doubt they have a true idea of how much it impacts the census cause they don't know how reholder requests were legit

I no longer trust buying slabs. That's what this did to me, although I'm presently bidding on one of yours before this went nuclear. You are one of the only places I trust if I were to buy a slab again.

I love that antique till 👀 I have one similar in the attic of my 120+ year old hardware store 😂

James you had to, i wanted your take

Glad I don't buy slabs. No matter what changes they do the scammers innovate WITH any changes and find new ways to cheat the system when there is hundreds and thousands of $ to be made.

They must have gotten access to the legitimate case, equipment supply chain.

How to open a CGC case without breaking it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vONa3k9gnVg.htmlfeature=shared

Are you at the Antique Depot during this video?

Cgc made a statement. Just saw it.

CBCS!

is the victim not the person who bought the book

How did CGC not notice 1 person doing "hundreds" of reslabbing books? Reslabbing is pretty rare, that should've been a clue. And I was scammed by this guy apparently. My ASM 194 CGC 9.8 Newsstand (1st Black Cat) is now kinda worthless. Luckily my credit card company gave me my money back, now I don't know what to do with this book.

Ya I was actually curious as to your opinion about this story 😮

They might be able to get him for art fraud

@MintHunterComics Hear me out. Not too long ago, every comic related channel on RU-vid would talk about how backed up CGC was. Could this not be a by-product of that back-up? I mean yes, some d-bag is pulling this scam. There's that. But the fact that they got away with it points to one of two circumstances. The first is that this guy was in on it. That's the obvious choice. But what if it is merely this one guy cutting corners because he is backed up? I mean if you ask for a re-holder, the risk has always been known to be that you may go from a perfect grade to a 9.6 or 9.4 if you chance sending it in to get a new holder to replace an original holder. How often do the grades go *up* instead of keeping the grade it had? I'd say it is far more common to dump a grade than as to keep it. Especially with the latest crop of new graders that seem to be more harsh than what we are used to. So maybe this guy was just like "screw it" and reholdered these books without re-grading them because he was trying to clear out his back-log. As for your point of CGC being a victim, I respectfully disagree. They may not have initiated the scam, but they are still culpable because they may have inadvertently aided the scammer. If the first attempt that went through got caught, then the scammer would have stopped pulling the scam once he knew he couldn't dupe CGC. But he did. And so he kept buying the lower grade stuff and switching it out. In the meantime, I think CGC should ask for a voluntary recall of all books the guy did, to truly ferret out all the affected books, because while the missing value stamp is an easy to look for, the guy doing this may have also re-holdered books with restoration as well.

CGC, perhaps they might do a price increase now ahahahah.

CGC got paid

The video cutaways are getting ridiculous.

I'm pretty sure this isn't illegal.