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Take a top sports autograph company with new partners ...all of a sudden limited signings start having bad stuff filter in with the good.
Their reputation is ruined .......bam....a name change and let's switch to celebrity stuff instead.
Get some big names and offer even more big names that you don't have under contract.
Ride the coat tails of other companies limited signings, but have plenty to fill every order and leftovers for the exchanges from pissed off buyers.
Then people who would know start sayin the TPAs have failed numerous CA items recently.
Is it possible Ford signed that piece while an earthquake hit, or his accident left him confused about his own signature, or someone shook the table having him start again at every line......sure.
Is it something I would ever feel comfortable about having in my collection.....no.
You each have to decide what will make you sleep best at night.
I know where I stand.
If Grad thinks they are selling fakes, why won't he say something about it? PSA has passed a lot worse than this one.
I agree Mike T.
Now I never mentioned names. Add to that fact, professional authenticators don't get involved in these public forum discussions. They didn't say a word when Discowookie/Moser was destroying people's prize posters and selling fake Fords to anyone and everyone with $300.
I can't explain why people in those positions choose not to engage in these matters, but my guess is something about their company's policies.
Marc Moser was an autograph collector who spent about 5 years buying up all the real Star Wars autographs that he could, and however he made his money, he bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. He pretty much bought all of K9's collection and nearly half of mine, along with high end collections from around the world. I can easily say that he amassed the largest "high end" collection in the world, and kept it well under wraps, never letting anyone know exactly what he had owned. We were friends and then some of his underhanded actions (shill bidding, creating new accounts to hide his identity) led to a falling out between us. A few years later he made amends and made parts of his collection known to the online world.
He was introduced to the masses on Rebelscum as someone the longtime collectors knew and proceeded to show off photos of his collection as well as images of himself at a lunch with Harrison Ford that he had won in a charity auction.
He twisted the lunch with Harrison into a signing and sent hundreds of items to Mr. Ford's office to be signed. Harrison being the nice guy he is, signed everything and had the package returned.
Marc showed off these authentic Ford autographs to people he met on rebelscum and quietly in private messages proceeded to tell people that while they couldn't tell anyone, he could help them, if they sent him items and money he could get their stuff missing Ford signed.
For nearly a year people continued to send him posters & photos, most of these signed by dozens if not hundreds of other Star Wars cast and crew members.
As you can imagine people with Harrison Ford autographs on their prized possessions can't stay quiet long, even when they promised Marc they wouldn't tell anyone or share any images. Soon other people now looking to sell their newly acquired Fords for profit, well they started showing off their items.
The first items that popped up on Rebelscum ....I called out as fake and each and every one that followed I did the same. Wattographs then put their own Fords up for sale listed as being from "A Friend" no other information provided, and this followed with the Autograph Bounty Hunter offering more of the same pieces. I kept on calling these items fake, and very few people listened. Why would they, all the "best" collectors and authenticators gave them the thumbs up.
This went on for months with only 3 or 4 people seeing it for what it was, and yes even those professional authenticators were taken in by the scam. The number of ruined pieces skyrocketed.
I was called a liar, and jealous, and just about every name in the book. Nearly a year of this passed until some people woke up and realized what was actually happening.
Marc claimed to be done with autographs and he hated the people in the hobby, he tried to buy back his friends with some of the nicest SW signed stuff on the planet, and most of these people took what they could get and to this day won't have anything to do with him.
Moser was unceremoniously kicked off rebelscum, those living close enough to him made sure that they took items from his authentic collection as reimbursement.....others weren't so lucky.
During this timeframe Marc sold about 1,000 pieces to one autograph dealer for a small fraction of the cost involved, and smaller packages to other dealers. His attempts to get Christie's, Sotheby's and the Joiner/Kurtz guys to buy the collection were stopped cold.
Thanks to the fact that Marc had shuffled the deck and made sure real and fake were so intermixed in every pile that few could tell them apart. Kudos to the Autograph dealers who did buy small portions, they had the right person verify the real from the forgeries before making them available for sale.
So this was a really long way to say, yes Steve, Moser was the guy who was moving large numbers of items...exact quantities I couldn't say, but it was likely this headache that got us talking.
Posted by CJCollector on November 27, 2024 at 2:23pm 0 Comments 1 Like
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