You should see the scams in trading cards. Well known Canadian seller was forging Upper Deck the Cup hockey cards. The Cup are the ultra high end cards. A tin of 5 cards runs you around $350. Some cards fetch tens of thousands. This particular seller was replacing full one color Jersey swatches imbedded in the cards, with multi-colored replacement patches, driving up the price by 5,6, sometimes 20 times the value. A swatch displaying the Blackhawks Indian head will fetch significantly more than a drab white jersey patch. Thing is; UD has a master sheet of the patches each numbered card has. So you can easily see when a patch has been replaced.
But the forging (for lack of better term) resulted in HIGE financial gains. Not to mention the multiple shill bids driving the price up further. He’s getting $800 instead of $350 on his shill bid ups. He’s got several hundred auctions at a time, do the math.
