Little bit of a longer post here, but hopefully you all will follow along with me.
I heard a horror story today of a deal on eBay gone completely sideways from an inexperienced seller. To be fair, this deal would have never gone sideways in the US because of the authenticity program, but outside the US it definitely did.
I won’t get into too many of the details other than the fact that this guy’s auction was won by a 1 feedback account on an expensive card, let’s call it 2500 bucks. Ships the card with video evidence of him packing and shipping it, and the guy says the classic scam line of “I received it with no card inside.”
That’s not the point of this post, however. The point of this post is that wrestling never used to be big enough where we had to think differently about things like trust and relationships and how those things impact the way we buy and sell cards. The wrestling cards were never that valuable where this stuff really had a target for scammers and people who want to fuck around.
Now that is not the case, and I really hope that people all understand that even though scammers have always operated in all areas of sports cards, things need to be different now in wrestling cards where both buyers and sellers need to take more precautions to protect themselves.
Sometimes those “too good to be true” type of offers are really too good to be true. It’s okay to walk away from a deal that seems fishy. It’s okay to ask for references. It’s okay to require protection on payments and not do friends and family. Don’t take risks you can’t afford to lose. I’ve used middle men, I’ve done weird deal structures I’ve done it all to avoid risk on shady deals, and I’ve still been scammed. There is no such thing as risk free buying and selling.
Trust your gut and use your relationships to enhance your experience. If you don’t have trusted relationships, this is your wake up call to build them. Never collect on an island.
We’ve all seen the shill bids and stupid zero feedback winners on 1/1 WWE auctions for the last 3 years, it’s only going to get worse as the space gets more popular. Protecting yourself on both sides of a deal has never been more important. I hope people really take this to heart, as it’s always been important, but more so now.