Card collecting is a fun hobby. The industry nurtures the love for sports, but at some point, it began to attract the wrong kinds of personalities. As it usually happens, whenever money comes into the picture, people are willing to do things they shouldn’t.
As investors started to see how valuable some of these cards were, some figured out a way to make money in the wrong way, which has led to some of the biggest scandals in the card-collecting industry.
Rampant Fraud
One big problem at the moment is the rampant fraud happening because of the pandemic. Everyone knows the card-collecting industry is seeing a major spike. A lot of people had to stay home and were saving money since they weren’t spending money like they used to.
The average person eats out frequently and spends money on other things throughout the week.
The pandemic shut down everything. Many folks had disposable income and nothing to spend it on, and along came card collecting. This hobby could be done online through auction sites. People were willing to sell or trade cards online, which is the reason this industry saw such a surge.
The collectors themselves got back to card collecting during the pandemic, too. People remembered their old collections and started looking through them, selling off what they could. This contributed to this spike, but it also attracted scammers to the industry.
The rampant fraud is mostly concentrated online but not entirely. Some of it involves people buying a card in the store and replacing it with a less valuable card. They take that back to the store and say the right card was not in the case or that the card was missing.
Of course, many people carry out similar crimes online. For example, a common online scam is one where buyers buy an authentic card and replace it with a high-quality replica. They return the item to the seller, claiming the card was not authentic.
The seller is trying to be honest and refunds the buyer only to find out he or she was tricked. The problem is that some new collectors don’t always know how to tell the difference between frauds and genuine cards, so they might not know their original cards were stolen.
Other scammers take pictures of highly valuable cards and place them on online auction sites. While some people do the research and confirm the owner is the last known owner of the card, others do not. New collectors are especially susceptible to this scam although veteran collectors could also fall victim if they’re unaware of this type of online scam.
Another type of scam that seems to be a problem in the card collecting industry is the signature scam. Some people will go out and find cards that are relatively inexpensive to run this scam.
The goal is to get something cheap and make it more expensive through forgery. These folks will do some research to find out what the signature of a particular player looks like and try to copy that signature. These folks practice for a long time before they try to run the scam. Most of them, try to sell these cards online to people who don’t know any better and are just willing to trust the seller. It’s such a sad thing because these new collectors could get discouraged if they’re scammed. They could even grow bitter against the hobby when the hobby is not connected to these scams.
Some crooks try to go to small, local card-collecting stores to sell the sports card forgery. The owners of these stores know a thing or two about cards, so they most likely won’t fall for the scam, but it’s possible.
This trick is used with relic cards, too. Most of the time, the item that accompanies the card is fake, such as the jersey or the bat. Collectors love relic cards because it means you own a piece of game history, so it’s sad that scammers are taking advantage of people who really care about the sport.
These are just some of the top scams and scandals today, but there are many more to know. If you’re thinking of getting into this hobby, make sure you learn to tell the difference between genuine and fakes. When you start collecting, there shouldn’t be a doubt in your mind if something is authentic. That’s how good you should be.
