This scam was a BIG one!

Welcome to another episode of the Ball Card Show, the sports podcast for the Sports Collector. I'm Jason Otero. I'm Gary Lomaster. This is season five, episode twenty. Twenty of them. We're halfway through the year, man. We are halfway through the year. It's crazy. And Columbus is melting. It's awful. The interstate was burning down the other day. Worse than that, I had to get up at 730 in the morning to mow on Monday. Yeah. Was it dewy? Was it a little too hot for dew? It was a little too hot for dew. It wasn't bad. In the front yard, I probably could have got away with waiting on it, but the backyard... So you live in a subdivision? I do. Arguably the most hated neighbor yesterday at 7 o'clock in the morning? No, I've got a battery-powered mower. It doesn't make any noise at all. Yeah, I can mow whenever. All right. It's nice. Well, that was some witty banter. Yeah, you like that? We do have a lot to talk about today. Some hobby news, and then a scandal that we've uncovered. It's pretty deep, pretty ugly. It's a pretty big story. I think you're going to be hearing more about it. We cannot wait to bring it to you. But before we do that, quick reminder for you. If you haven't yet, take a moment to like, to subscribe, to follow. If you're on socials, if you're on YouTube, whatever, be sure that you're following us. Every single Thursday, we drop a new episode, and every single Thursday night, we go live on WhatNot for Sudden Death Auctions. 7 p.m. 7 p.m. Now, a couple weeks ago, we dropped a video where we did a product review of JuiceBox Repacks, the 50-slab case. We made a deal with them. We said, hey, you can send it. We're going to give you an honest review. The deal is we're not keeping this stuff. We're giving it away. We don't want anything to smell of nepotism or what would be another ... Yeah, nepotism is the right word, but we don't want anything to smell of like sweetheart deals or anything like that. Nepotism is not the right word there at all, actually. More of a quid pro quo. There it is. Yeah, that's what you want. We're giving all these away. Gary, show off a few of the highlights that we'll be giving away. 10 slabs every week for the next several. Justin Herbert, blue number to 75. It's about $100 slab, PSA 10. This might be my favorite one. It's not as big as the other, but I love it. Hines Ward on the field level tricolor to 75 in a PSA 10. This doesn't suck. Fernando Tatis Jr. on the pink tops chrome, PSA 9 rookie. For you Raiders fans out there, how about a little Howie Long, pop one, PSA 10 number to 100. Some really cool stuff. Some other baseball stuff. Ellie Jackson-Holiday, rookie, PSA 10. Some football. Long story short, we're giving it all away. Buyers give ease, but you could just spend a dollar. Trust me. I was just telling them on TikTok live, we get cooked for two bucks all the time on cards. Just get one of those. In theory, you could win all 10 of these. If that happens, we both win because we're going to go viral, but not for the right reason. You've also figured out how to hack a system that Gibby Goblin's been trying to figure out for a long time. You showed the Tatis slab. I think we would jump right into that story because it's an interesting one. If you aren't aware, Fernando Tatis, Jr. and his representation filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court within the last week or two against a company called Major League Advance. If you're not familiar with who Major League Advance is, they are a company who scouts minor league players, looks for guys who have high upside, and they know that they're getting paid jack squat. They go to them when they're 17, 18 years old or making $300 a week and say, hey, what if we do what these big league teams didn't do? Let's give you a huge advance. Why don't we give you $3 million? In this case, it was $2 million back in 2016. We'll give you $2 million. All you have to do is, if you get to the big leagues, because I'm sure this is how they phrase it, if you get to the big leagues, you just give us 10% of all your future pre-tax earnings, which, considering the fact that one out of 100 dudes in the minors ever has a big league career worth sniffing, seems like a pretty great deal. To a 17-year-old with a non-fully formed prefrontal cortex, it feels like a great deal. This is what happened to Tatis. He signed this deal. He got $2 million, and then he signed a $348 million deal here a few years ago. These people came knocking and said, hey, you owe us $35 million. By the way, not only do you owe us $34.8 million, but you owe it to us in a lump sum, even though you're going to get paid over the next 10 years. So Tatis went, wait a minute, I was 17 when I signed this, and yes, you had me sign it in a different country, but you're enforcing it here in the United States. California has some pretty strict laws about this. So I think we don't actually owe you this. This lawsuit's going to be a really good litmus test on whether this type of a predatory, and I think it's a predatory business model for Major League Advance, is going to hold any water or not. I have a feeling that it's not. It's an interesting case because you have, in some cases, families with very minimal resources and they're investing in those players that never pan out as well on the belief that once in a generation a deal happens with the Tatis and he holds up his end of the bargain. Now, it was looking for a minute like this was a guy that was on PED suspensions, what was happening to his career, and he wasn't interested in suing them. Well he got that contract before that. I understand. But now we want to go after that money. It just seems like weird timing to me. It does seem a little off. I think that these types of lawsuits take a little bit of time to figure out what the strategies are going to be. That's true. It could have been started for a minute. My guess is that he pretty quickly, after signing this deal, went, wait a minute. The 385 contract was right before the suspension, is that right? It was like six months before the suspension, yeah. For somebody who doesn't think it was after, you're right. Yeah. It was like 30, so $35 million basically. So it wasn't like as soon as he got that. It's still possible at that time, but not likely. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, I've heard stories of like what Perfect Game has done, where you have kids signing away more than they realize and staff being encouraged to do that than you have. But I think that it is probably something that has helped a lot of young families too in areas where they don't have the resources on the chance that they could take care of the family. Just because something helps some people doesn't mean it's not predatory and bad. I guess the caveat here is that he was 17. Yeah. That's a really big point. But let's not also forget what happens to 17 and 18 year olds when they go to an institution called a university and they have financial aid for them on the belief that on the other side of this degree, you're going to give us way more money than we gave you. So there's a little bit less risk for the MLB player, the prospect, that doesn't make it. Well, no, for sure. Than for the student that does get the degree that doesn't make them any money. But it's not like this company is going out to guys who look like they're going to be long-term dev list guys and going, hey, let's give you millions of dollars. Yeah, they didn't offer it to me right out of Bible college. It's no different than when you're looking at baseball cards. It's very much the same philosophy. I guarantee you this company offers that same deal to dudes who are such a flyer that it's not funny. But instead of $2 million for 10%, they're like, we'll give you $30,000 for 10% of your future earnings. And when that guy gets there, they've really made out. So I'm not a fan of that business model. It's not as prevalent. Are the court filings there or is it just a suit at this point? It's just a suit at this point. The suit has been filed. I do think that the fact that Major League Baseball over the last couple of years has invested in the minor league systems and actually started paying minor league players and making sure that they can live at at least a minimum wage rate, because I don't know if a lot of people understand, low A, high A, until you got to certain double A or triple A teams, minor league players are like sleeping on people's couches and making $300 a week in the season. And the rest of the year, they're working at Foot Locker. If you were a top three round pick, you don't have cash. So anyhow, that's that story. You want to get to the meat and potatoes of the news this week? We have a story that we want to introduce to you. If you are active in Facebook, sports car community at all, or connected with a lot of larger dealers in the Midwest, there's a good chance that you've heard about this in the last couple of weeks. There was a story that broke during the national about some cases being stolen and some cards missing. Nothing new to hear at the national, but there was a lot of speculation about who did it. Was it on the up and up? Were they really stolen? That story has evolved into a much larger one that we believe might be possibly the largest Ponzi scheme we've seen in the sports car space in quite some time. There are dealers directly that work with us on a regular basis that we have been able to confirm some of these stories with. There are names that are not going to be mentioned, as you'll understand when we get into this, that they're delicate situations. But I think it's really important for you to hear how this happens, because you're going to have a ton of questions as we begin to unpack this. So let's just dive in, Gary. I'll let you kick it off and get it rolling. Let's give some context about the people involved, this scheme, this scam, whatever you want to call it, that's been running for a while, that's got somebody in a massive amount of debt, but even more trouble at this point. So here's what we've got. Here's what we know. Some of what we're going to talk about here involves mild, and when I say mild, I mean very mild amounts of speculation, and when we talk about that, we'll make sure we tell you that that's what we think. These are allegations. Allegations, yes. None of this is in court yet, although it's headed that way. It's headed toward criminal prosecution. So here's the story. As Jason said, the theft at the National last year was the little thread in the carpet that stuck up and started to be plucked at. You like that? It's a great visual. You like that visual? Yeah. Wax poetic, sir. The perpetrator in this situation is a gentleman by the name of Chad Smith, of Chad Smith's cards. Now, some of you listening, I know who that guy is. He's been around the hobby for a long time, but what is really bad about this is as this is all coming out, we're starting to see more and more indications that this is a pattern of behavior for this man, that it goes back 25 years. He's come in and out of the hobby several times, waiting until all the mess dies down and then comes back. The difference is, we have social media now, and the card space way more than we did seven years ago. It just happened on Facebook. Instagram was showing some images of cards. Even seven years ago on Facebook, it wasn't anything like it is now. There were maybe five or six groups that were card groups. There wasn't anything big at all. So if somebody was doing this and laying low, it was easier to resurface later. We don't know if that was intentional, but again, as that thread was pulled, we found there's way more that's been going on. So as Jason said, and I'm going to recap this, Joe Mania, Chad Smith, Chad Smith's cards, and I have all this written down to keep my brain going in the right direction, so forgive me as I'm looking down instead of looking right at you guys. You know what I like is when you explain it to people on camera, it makes it more helpful, and then we were able to give them 20 more seconds of content. Absolutely. Chad Smith of Chad Smith's Cards has been accused of running a years-long Ponzi scheme that has affected some of the biggest dealers' names in the hobby. Mr. Smith is reportedly at least, at least a million dollars in debt to multiple people. That's just the people that we know about, including Mike Marshall and Terry Boyd of Big Boyd's Cards, or Big Boyd Cards. If that sounds familiar to you, Big Boyd Cards, it's because they are one of the largest independent sellers of sports cards on eBay, over 1.1 million items sold on eBay from singles to cases of cards. At this time, other victims, known victims in this scheme have chosen to remain anonymous until the legal process plays out. So the names that we are going to be talking about as victims here, the only names you're going to hear us say are Mike Marshall and Terry Boyd. Everybody else that we talk about, we're just going to say this happened to a person because we do not have permission to use their names at this point. We're going to honor and respect that for lots of reasons. So here's what we know. At the National in 2024, there was a really well-publicized theft that included several really nice individual cards, as well as, let's see, it was 5, 8, 10, like 12 or 13 cases of unopened wax, including National Treasures, Tops Chrome Baseball stuff, like a lot of big stuff. This inventory belonged to Terry Boyd of Big Boyd Cards. Now, he's a big player. Yes. eBay, he has over a million sales on eBay. Over 1.1 million. Yeah, so he's been, thank you. He's been doing that for a minute and some would argue fairly effective if you had 1.1 million sales on eBay. Yeah. So, Chad Smith was somebody who would source product for Terry Boyd. Oh, yeah. And then, a lot of times, things were drop-shipped, like he would say, hey, I have this case. Terry would list the case. Back it up and slow it down. Back up, slow it down. Chad finds a case of flawless. He thinks there is a price point where it is mutually beneficial for him and for Terry. How does that work? So, slow it down and explain it. Yeah, so Mike finds the case of, or Mike, Chad finds the case of flawless in this example. This is just an example. This is not a specific actual situation. Let's say it's a $15,000 retail value case and he can buy it for $11,000. So at that point, he reaches out to Terry and says, hey, I've got this case of Flawless. Looks like it retails at $15,000. I can get it for $11,000. Do you want it? Terry says, sure. So Terry then directly pays the person and then Chad takes the case. If there's time, Chad ships the case to Terry, who then fulfills the order. If there's not time, Chad has the case, Terry lists it, it sells quickly, and he says, Chad, here's the address it's going to, ship it. So it's a drop ship in that situation. Nothing wrong with that. That's perfectly fine in and of itself. So circling back to what happened at the National, what we believe occurred is that Terry owned this inventory. He told Chad Smith, do not take this inventory to the National. Do not. I don't know exactly why. My guess is because it was probably listed. Don't take this inventory to the National. Chad takes it to the National anyway, at which point it all gets stolen. Now this is the lie that starts the downfall. It takes several months, but it starts the downfall. One of the cards that was stolen was a Joe Burrow clearly downtown one of one. One you don't see every day. Yeah. It's not a card that's hard to identify and it was very well publicized that this was one of the things that was stolen. So this happens. People are asking questions, but it's like, okay, that's where we're at. Several months later, Mr. Smith then cons a 14-year-old kid at the time out of the price of a case of Flawless. It was around $12,000 to $14,000. What happened there was the kid wanted to buy the case. Chad said, I don't have it with me, but send PayPal here. I'll ship it to you. No big deal. Some people are sitting here going, how does that happen? How somebody possibly does that? We'll explain it in a minute. We'll explain that. So this happens. The case never gets shipped. The case never gets shipped. Eventually this young man, his father finds out. His father finds out at that point and his father goes, okay, we're taking legal action. So once Mr. Smith realizes that legal action is being taken, he quickly starts to scramble and try to figure out how to buy himself time. The first thing he does is says, hey, I'm going to pay this over time if you'll work with me. I'm going to send you $3,000 right now. He mails a check. That should have been first weird thing because everything in this hobby happens electronically. Mails a check. The check bounces. Now this family is really incensed. That would make me so much more angry. At which point Mr. Smith goes, okay, here's how I'm going to handle this now. Let me show you all these downtowns and kabooms that equal out to more value than what this case was. Let's just get this taken care of. He sends them a bunch of pictures. Turns out these pictures were just out of somebody's showcase at a shop in Tennessee. That is a wild behavior. Hold on, hold on. Yeah. Hey, I have something better than money. I have a check. Wait. The check bounced? Hold on. I've got something better. What if I told you I have way more of this over here snapping every showcase? I'll get that right to you. So they're expecting a package of all these downtowns. What they get instead is one card. Want to guess what that card was, Jason? What couldn't be the stolen 101 Clearly Downtown? How'd you know? What are the odds of that? So it was like Homeward Bound where the dogs go missing, but they come running back. That burrow found its way back. Yeah. It found its way back. Man, good. I'm glad to hear that. He sends that card to these people. Now this is about a $12,000 to $14,000 item. This is not a low dollar item. And at this point, they're like, okay, this makes it right. They don't know that this was stolen. Not everybody follows the hobby news as closely as we do and some of y'all do. They didn't know it was stolen, so they think everything's fine. Well, obviously it's not. At this point, Mr. Marshall starts reaching out to potential victims. The reason Mr. Marshall, Mike is in all of this, is that him along with several other reputable dealers that have done business with Chad over a long period of time have gotten to a point where they essentially have a little bit of credit. I know for some of us that may be working smaller spaces of cash, smaller local shows, that idea sounds unbelievable, but when you've done hundreds of thousands of dollars in business with somebody and they say, hey, if I grab this stack and I have that money to you within three months or two months and here's how I'll pay you, and they've done that in the past and they've paid in the past, it's something that most people think it's reasonable to continue to do. Right? Yeah. Mike is in a situation where he has lent stuff out and there's more things that are happening that we're going to cover here in a minute, but as he's talking to more victims, he realizes that the string of victims is a mile long and here's what has started to happen. Mr. Smith is way behind on what he owes several different dealers for their cards. What he's doing is on credit, he's getting cards from the dealers, immediately turning around on these high value cards and unloading them for 30 to 50% of comps just so he can take that cash and spread a little bit back to all the people he owes money to. That's where the Ponzi scheme comes in. That's exactly how it works. The Ponzi scheme does not continue to work for him. It's a rake on the front end and then you have to keep doing this to other people continually to keep people fed. It must be exhausting. Oh, mentally and emotionally completely exhausting, yes. But he's taking more cards. He came to me and I gave him $10,000 in cards and three months he's supposed to pay me back on that. He doesn't. He comes back. He gives me a little bit. He gives me these $3,000 worth of cards. He turns around, sells them for $1,500, gives me $750 of that back to keep me at bay for a little bit. Imagine scaling this across. There's allegations that in one of these cases he owes someone over $500,000 in cash or card, however that works out. It's a name that if we were allowed to say it, you would recognize. As this is going on and it's being discovered that not only is he way behind, owes a lot of people money, a lot of people getting ripped off, but now we're selling things that we bought on credit at half of price just to keep people at bay and at a distance, nobody's getting their money back. This is becoming really, really obvious. What makes this even stranger is he was able to keep paying people enough to make them believe that he's trying to figure out it's going to work, but people are growing very impatient. People aren't happy, but there's money still coming so they're like, okay, maybe this is eventually going to get taken care of. What happens is Mr. Smith finds himself in jail for a non-card related issue. For 90 days. He's in there for 90 days and those payments stop because there's nobody else to hustle or get a credit off of and move their cards at a discount to keep the people you owe a lot of money to happy. I know this is disorienting, but it's a very real thing that can happen to a lot of people. During that time, he even makes phone calls to Mr. Marshall where he acknowledges many of these things happened. While he's in jail, he's using some of his 15 minute phone calls. We have heard these phone calls. We've listened to them. These things that we're talking about, they're allegations. That wasn't on purpose, but it happened. These allegations, the fact that we've heard these phone calls is why we're reporting on this. They're credible allegations with verbal admissions to a lot of this stuff recorded. In a one party state, but also from that system. But it's from jail. It's automatically recorded anyways. Anyway, so there's the recordings there. He's recently released from jail and we're being told the authorities are being involved in this at this point, but this is the wild thing to me. Once this has been exposed and there's just the mass and magnitude of it. For Mr. Smith, there is an empathetic piece of me that's like, that has to be an overwhelmingly impossible situation to be in at this point. Was it self inflicted? Was there all this stuff happening? But in the moment you're in right now, that's got to be a lot of pressure. But there was an expectation that Mr. Marshall said, which was, especially after finding out that a kid was ripped off, I don't want to see you at local shows. This scam, this stuff you're doing, this line of credit, these little games you're playing have to stop. I don't want to see you at any local shows or I have to move forward with this. What happened last week? The show we were at. There he is. There he is walking the tables. Maybe selling you something at 30 to 50% of comps that's really not his to sell. And so at that point, the story got bigger. But what I want to do is back up. So that's the gist of the story. From our understanding, this is moving in the direction of criminal prosecution. From our understanding, the numbers are a million, but here's the reality. We don't know what the exact numbers are. That's just of the people that are known victims. And what they're saying. Someone could say, somebody owes me 50 grand, but they owe 25. We don't have a way to verify that. We don't have that. Based off of what we're being told, we're pushing seven figures on that. So the obvious question for 99% of people listening to this is, how in the world did somebody get that much credit for that long from so many people? And how did they keep him at bay for that long? It's kind of fascinating that it was pulled off for as long as, but it's also so sad. Both things are true, but I would like for everybody who's listening to this who is going in their head going, oh, that would never happen. I would never let somebody get that deep into me to stop and think about this. There's a gentleman by the name of Bernie Madoff, who you've probably heard of. He conned Fred Wilpon, who was the billionaire owner of the New York Mets, who got so deep. Bernie Madoff was so deep with Fred Wilpon, like debt to dollar return wise, that the Wilpon family had to sell the Mets to get out from under it. You don't become a billionaire as an idiot. So well, leave it alone. But at the end of the day, this can happen to anybody. So here's how it happens. Nobody's saying, hey, Chad Smith, I'm just going to, here's a hundred grand of credit with me. Have fun. That's not how it works. I'm going to use Mr. Marshall as an example here because he told me exactly how it happened to him. I'm going to use his words. Over about an 18-month period, maybe a two-year period, leading up to where he started to give Chad Smith any credit with him, Chad Smith probably spent, in Mike's words, $500,000 to $700,000 with him without any issue. It was a $10,000 card, he had $10,000. It started with, hey, I just dropped a bunch of money over here. We've got these couple of cards that I'd really like to have. I know it's $10,000. I've only got $3,000 on me. If I give you the $3,000 right now, can I give you that $7,000 over the next month? It'll probably be even faster than that. I just don't have the cash on me and I don't want to miss out on the cards. For dealers that have not scaled to a massive size, brick and mortar, blah, blah, blah, all that, you take your inventory when you can find it in the ways you can. If you can get in bulk at the right margins, you have to spend your cash on it because it's not walking in every day. I understand that sentiment of, hey, I just bought a huge collection. That happens at shows sometimes. You and I will be there. Somebody walks up. It's not exactly what we're looking for and I'll just say, hey, I've done more buying than selling today, so I'm pretty picky. Sometimes it'll be, hey, Gary, can I borrow $500 real quick? I'm out of cash. Of course. That's how that starts. Of course, if somebody spent that kind of money with me and I've developed what I think is a good relationship with somebody who's not giving me any reason at this point not to trust them, I'm going to say, yeah, that's fine. Then over the next two weeks instead of a month, he gives me the seven grand and he goes, hey, here's a couple hundred bucks on top. I appreciate you taking care of me on it. You're like, oh, sweet. Then another month or two goes by where he's just paying cash for stuff and then the next time he needs credit, it's not seven grand. He wants 12. You're like, okay. He pays that back. After two or three times of it getting paid back without any question, now when he's like, hey, I need 20, you're like, sure. No big deal. Then when it gets to 30, 40, 50, instead of paying you back, he's like, hey, I've only got five grand right now. Can I have another two or three weeks? At first you're like, yeah, stuff happens. That's fine. Also, if you have some type of a working relationship with somebody and that's what they're telling you and you realize it's five grand or nothing, nobody says no. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I want what you can do. Yeah. You know? So that's how it happens. It's also really important to remember that everything, scale matters. To some of us, five grand is a big chunk of change at once. To some people, that's like ten bucks to you and me, right? People that are dealing with $100,000 cards on a regular basis, five grand, they're like, whatever, it's fine. You can give it to me when you can. So everything is scale, right? It matters. But for those of you wondering how this happens, that's how. Then when it's happened to five, six, seven different people and all of a sudden it's not 30 grand, it's 250 or 500 or a million, that's how a Ponzi scheme works. Now he has to keep inventory coming in that he can then flush out. One that occurred in this specific case, Mr. Smith bought two specific cards from Mike Marshall on credit. There was an EZE cut auto and there was a Charles Dickens auto. There was a Charles Dickens cut and an EZE custom auto, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Some of you are going to look for a reason to say, yeah. That's what they were. Those cards, he got from Mr. Marshall on credit, turned around, sold them to another one of the victims at like 35% of value, took that money and gave it back to Mike Marshall on debts from before. That's egregious. Yes. At this point, it's like, I'm going to rob more from you just to keep you quiet. Yes, exactly. This is what was happening on a regular basis. Here's the thing too. The sports card space, is the industry growing? Is the collector base massive? Yes, but the community of people doing it as a business, while it's growing and big, it's not that big. A card like some of these that are unique and high value, other people are going to post on their Instagram that they just picked this card up. They're going to talk to, hey, Mike, didn't you used to have this Charles Dickens? The big names are a tight community. Yeah. They're like, man, he gave it to me at a steal. Can you imagine finding out that you thought you were helping this guy get the inventory to move more products to take care of you and all he's doing is taking more from you and cutting it in half. It's essentially no way of getting it back. No, exactly. That's how it happens. It doesn't happen instantly. It happens over time. The first thing Jason said to me when we were talking about covering the story was, what's this guy's angle then? How does this help him? It doesn't on the back end. He makes his money on the front end of it. This is one of those speculative things. This may have been the time where he comes back into the sports card industry and says, hey, I want to do it right this time. I can't say that for sure. It may have been the intention to just run a business because as you're running it, one of the things when you run a business is most businesses do have lines of credit and they do have debt in order to keep cash moving. Then it gets out of control. That's what happened here. Now, what leads me to think maybe that isn't the case is when this story was first posted in the scammers group by Mike Marshall, the number of people who chimed in on that thread saying, oh man, this dude got me 10 years ago for 20 grand. This dude got me 15 years ago for 17 grand. This dude seems to have been a scumbag for a long time. Is that fair? Seems to have been? That's the way it looks. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a scenario here where a lot of big players have been affected. It's a large, large amount of money. We think it's really important to our audience to help you protect yourself. At some point during this, you have seen this man's picture on your screen. We didn't do that to embarrass him. We did it to protect you. If you see this person at shows walking around, don't sell him stuff. Help him in this enterprise. Protect yourself. Is that fair? Yeah. In a lot of other industries, at the scale and volume that you're moving, if he's buying over a million dollars in cards a year, imagine a storefront doing this to people and how that story would capitalize. This is why when we talk about the sports card space and we warn you against some of the biggest names in the hobby, it's not that we are, what they say, clout chasing. We are trying to expose from whether it's a dealer or a breaker or a buyer, whatever it is, and where unethical practices that hurt this industry are coming into play and they're at the card shows we're set up at and they're screwing over the dealers that we work with. We want you out of the space. Yes. 100%. Unapologetically. When you try to turn this stuff into, and not so much in this case, but it turns into like a PR firm trying to resurrect your image, why do you need that so bad? That's a good question to ask. Yeah. Why do we need to appear so differently all of a sudden? Right now, it's the wild west. There's fast, quick, big money moving through this industry and there are people that are going to take advantage of it just like any industry. The reason for that is greed is in the driver's seat a lot of times when we talk about a space like this. Collectibles. Already, you guys know this, and gals, if you're collecting things, you get possessive of them. We're like Gollum with the ring with our PC, my precious, right? It's like very easy to get greedy and very easy to overreach and boy, credit has hurt a lot of people. It's their choice to make, but for those of you throwing stones here in this Chad Smith story, how many of you have burned through your credit cards on breaks? You're doing the same thing to yourself, now the difference is somebody might come get your car or house for that because they're not going to be as patient as a lot of these dealers have been. Or you can file bankruptcy on that. You can file bankruptcy, but these stories happen a lot where people overreach even with the right intentions. I'd like to believe that he was hoping this would be the time that I get this right. One thing I will say, I wouldn't say in defense of Mr. Smith, it's not defending him in any way was you have to know that at some point this is catching you. You have to know that these players that I'm buying, if I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with somebody, they're not going to be okay with me not paying them back. I think he has to be aware of that. There were multiple times during all this where he was flat out scamming too. Hey, Terry, I found this case. Terry sells the case and Chad's supposed to ship it and there's no case. A lot of misdirection and then again, we were able to listen to the calls. I don't think that that's right for us to put that out there. It's not our place at all. Not until it's at least legally filed. It sure seemed like somebody was admitting that there were some practices like that of selling images of cards out of showcases that were active in the LCS. Oh, that was super wild. So be on the lookout. Mr. Smith could be at a local show near you. The other dealers have discouraged him from doing that. It does sound like legally this thing is developing. I hope that it's resolved for all parties. I hope he's held accountable to the fullest extent. I hope he's held accountable and as close to making these dealers whole as possible, but I don't know how that's going to happen at this point. I don't think that ever happens, but he can at least be held criminally accountable. One final thing before we shift gears into the value box, which is actually a similar topic this time, but if it weren't for people like Mr. Marshall making a point of this, this probably ends as a, well, something happened at the National last year, but we don't know. It cannot be easy for somebody to have that long of a working relationship with somebody and for things to turn that sour and for them to put themselves out there and to say, here's what is happening, for them to go find out if it's happened to others, for them to stand in the gap for other people going through stuff. So I actually have a ton of respect for Mr. Marshall for doing this. I think that's a lot of why sometimes things like this never get uncovered. If you're the victim, and not just in financial crimes, lots of things, when you're a victim, especially when the first thing that anybody who hears about this is going to go, how in the world does that happen to you? There's a lot of embarrassment. Sure, yeah. Like, is this going to affect my overall business? Are people going to think I'm not a good business person because this happened to me? That embarrassment is a very powerful motivator to be quiet. That potential shame is a very powerful motivator to be quiet. So like you said, to Mike's credit, being willing to go, hey, I'm going to have to eat this multiple five figures that is owed to me at this point, somewhere between 30 and 50 grand, because it's more important to me that I keep this from happening to other people than it is for me to get this, because I'm never going to get it anyway at this point. If you're not known for integrity in this space, it's a short run for you. And I think that of even some of the bigger brands. Some of them that have a loyal following right now, we've mentioned them, we've talked about them, but at some point people have enough, and when the story drops and you find out that it's not one person, it's several, you just can't keep ripping people off and getting away with it. I guess I'll just kind of leave it there. Integrity matters, and respect matters. I say a lot of times, Jason's heard me say it, it's much more important to me in all aspects of my life, but especially in my business. I'd much rather people respect me than like me, and there's a lot of people the other way around. It's much more important to be liked than respected. I'll say one other thing. We're really going on about this. But there's this pressure in the community to focus on hobby positivity, right? When somebody drastically changes their behavior and all of a sudden everything is, you just got to be positive, you just got to be positive. That's a red flag to me, what happened, right? And two things can exist. Last night I was looking through some cards I picked up at an LCS in Powell, Ohio, father's son. Great LCS, great ownership. Great staff. There's a few really awesome ones that I like to work with in the area, but made up of collections. And last night as I'm pricing these out, I'm just like, man, this is so awesome. It was a Jordan insert from the mid-90s, it's worth a few hundred bucks, nothing crazy. I'm just looking at the card like, this is so cool, this is so fun. It's late at night, I'm pricing, I'm still tired, I've been overworking, and I just still love this stuff. I still love these cards, I still love collecting, I love that it's a part of pop culture and that I'm in a time machine. We get to make our living doing this, it's so cool. We get to make our living and work our butt off for it. But also, while that is positive, this negative stuff exists and it's a detriment to the industry, to the hobby, to collecting. And if you have a podcast where you're talking about things happening in the hobby, we're not doing our job if we do not point out these things that happen. So let's shift gears, we'll get to the value box. I just realized I'm going to have to walk over and grab my low end. If you've got pictures, I can just throw them up on the screen. You can talk about it. Oh, perfect. I'll throw pictures up on the screen. Perfect. That'll work. That'll work. Yeah. I like how you already thought about it. Did you have a brief oh crap moment? I did, and then I thought about it and I was like, we're good. Yeah, they're going to see. Never mind, I'll leave that alone. I'm going to leave that alone. Value box day. We want to talk through, especially coming off of this story, just a quick overview of some common scams that are out there and how you can avoid them. So obviously this is a more in-depth, intricate, drawn out play that we were sharing with you for the first 30 minutes of this episode, but we want to talk about the ones that most of you could run into and ways to avoid them, things that happen at shows and things that can happen online. Yeah, fair. What do we want to go to first? Let's talk about in-persons scams first because they're the least, they're the less likely to happen and the least intricate. They're the easiest to spot if you know what you're looking for. So the most common ones involve either sleight of hand or some type of misdirection at a show. The way that it happens is a potential scammer sees a really busy dealer that's going 100 miles an hour and one of the easiest things for them to do is just straight up theft. They'll walk over, they'll see you're really busy doing five things. Let's say they're going through a value box and maybe they're making a little stack and one, two, three in the stack, one in the pocket, two in the stack, one in the pocket and then they'll even come over and buy from you. In value box, a lot of times people come in my value box, they're going to get that stuff for 70% a sticker or so and they really got it at 30% because they stuck another 100 bucks worth of stuff in their pocket because I was going 100 miles an hour. Pokemon's really bad. So that's something that you can just keep your eyes peeled and if you get too busy, take a deep breath and slow down and make sure you're always scanning your surroundings. The other really common one is when somebody's paying you, especially on a larger deal, they're counting out. There's 1,000, there's 1,000, there's 1,000. You glance away, you hear there's 1,000, but there was really 800. Then they point to all the stacks and count it up and it all looks pretty much the same and you go, cool. You scoop it up and they saved 200 bucks or 300 bucks or 20 bucks, whatever it is. The last one is less common, but I've seen it happen more than once and that's the accusation of damage. Hey, and this happened to some friends of ours recently, hey, are you interested in this card? You hand them the slab, let me take a look. You look at it, maybe you scan it, then you hand it back to them and say, let me look it up, let me see what I can do on it. You hand it back to them, you're looking it up and you hear, wait a minute. You look up and they go, there's a crack in this slab. That crack wasn't there when I handed it to you and you're like, what are you talking about? I had it in my hands for two seconds, you didn't see me do this, what is going on? Well, that crack wasn't there. That type of stuff, that corner wasn't dinged. That kind of a scam happens more than you would think. So those are the three main types of things that happen at a show. If you are doing a cash deal, especially after hearing the story and you're risk averse or maybe you're newer to the hobby, you don't know how you want to do it, I would not recommend extending credit, handing cards, bring me the money later. There are relationships that I have in the space in the central Ohio area, there's maybe a handful at most of dealers that I would be willing to do that with. But again, look at the story today, give me the cash, I'll give you the cards, it's a pretty simple transaction there. So that would be one to consider. Let's talk about online where it happens a lot more. So there's a lot of ways to get scammed, different platforms that you can be scammed on. Probably the most common one we see is sales generated through Facebook. Facebook groups more particularly, there are some massive Facebook groups moving seven figures a day. Oh yeah. Again, it's just different members posting and listing and selling, but some red flags to watch out for. So first off, if you don't know what a coin is, when somebody posts a picture of a card, a coin is supposed to have their name, the current date on a sheet of paper or something with the card so that you can see just like the old movies where somebody was kidnapped, they hold up the newspaper to verify that it's the person's. Now with AI and Photoshop and all this other stuff, it is easy for people to say, oh, well I was just out on the road. I'll be back home in a little bit. If you want to send payment over, blah, blah, blah. Well if you wouldn't mind, could you just coin? that for me when you get home and I'll be sure to send payment as soon as possible. The other thing that I'll try to do is when it comes to different payment methods, there are some where you have protections, some where you kind of have protections, and some where you have no protection if something goes south. So the most common platform by far still is PayPal. Yes. PayPal has two ways you pay, friends and family, or goods and services. If you pay goods and services, there is a 3% fee on top of the transaction, it is customary for you as the buyer to cover that fee as a sense of goodwill. Sometimes you'll hear people say, I'll buy it at 150 net, and that means they want that 3% included in that. But I always assumptively say, presumptively, assumptively say, both, hey, no problem, I'm going to shoot that to you, goods and services, now, and I'm going to cover the fees, pause. I'm looking for either a thumbs up, okay, or any other answer which tells me this is shady. Yeah. If somebody's like, no, we can't do that, blah, blah, blah, I'll be like, interesting, why? Just see what they say. Probably getting uneasy about that deal. Now you have a goods and services on Venmo, what I don't know yet is how consistent they are with taking care of the buyer. It's 50-50. It really is. If you pay friends and family, don't expect anything to happen if you're wronged or the wrong thing is shipped to you. So, Shap, Zelle, similar situation there with that. But I always just recommend going with goods and services if you want to have a little bit of protection. Also on goods and services payments, this is really important to help with that protection. When you are given the option to type in what you're buying, be extremely detailed. I bought a card last night and I'd list out exactly what it was, 2023, select draft picks, Bryce Young, black, one of one, PSA 9. You just wanted a way to bring up that you bought the one of one. Well, both. But be very detailed, right? Be very detailed on that. Because if you get an item and it's not what it was supposed to be, how do you prove what it was supposed to be? You have to be detailed there. The confidence with the buyers matters too because let's say that you bought a lot of like maybe you have a couple showcases at a show and you're rolling with $5,000 to $10,000 worth of inventory at any given time, right? So you're in it a little bit, but you're not putting expensive cards out. But you built a lot of 1,000 cards because you got wiped out last week and there's an issue with shipping or you only got half of your cards. It takes time for PayPal to make it right for you. So that can be a huge headache to you, it really matters. So what are things that you can do to protect that? So a couple things first in the Facebook group, particularly is you can click on the little magnifying glass at the top of the group somewhere and search the name of the person selling and you'll be able to see any transactions, comments, anything they were involved in in the group. I like to see that somebody's not brand new to the group. Then I click on their profile and I see do I have any mutual friends or people I respect that I've dealt with, okay? So that's kind of a barrier. If I don't see any of that, it makes me a little nervous. You have some other really good ones for socials too to keep an eye out for. Then the first thing you want to know, the overseas scamming farms have discovered that Facebook support card groups are ripe for the picking. So a few things right off the bat and some of these are going to sound really stupid and he's going to laugh and then he's going to go, yeah, but that's a good point. I'm just telling you what's going to happen here. If you see a profile that's new to the group and their name is two first names or it's last name then first name, that's a red flag. Isn't that an old adage? Don't ever trust somebody with two first names. Yeah, but it really is a red flag. Why? Because it's a common theme. It's a commonality across scamming. It's just like these scamming farms exist. Yeah, yeah. So two first names is first red flag. Second red flag is when you go to their profile, they have like 15 friends and they're all thirst traps. If you don't know what thirst trap is, Google it. I'm not going into it. But it's all thirst traps and the profile is three weeks old. Oh, the coin. The coin is another good one. So visually, most of these guys are photoshopping the coins. So first things, before you look at any of the handwriting on it, look at the piece of paper and look at the card that's with it. Is the lighting different on them? Does the card look really small compared to the paper or the paper really small compared to the card? Is there a shadow where there shouldn't be? Things that visually, if you just slow down for a minute and pay attention, will jump out like a sore thumb at you. You'll just be like, oh yeah, I see what you're talking about. You can say, hey, could you coin that again? I'm sorry, I got ripped off in the past. I just want to make sure it's right. Could you do this on another sheet of paper and make it the same size as the card? Or ask for a video coin. Hey, could you make a video? Could you say my name as you're showing the card? So those are things to look for. The other thing on the coin, and this is another pretty dead giveaway, here in the United States, we write our dates day, month, year. So it would be 6-26-25 for today. Overseas they'll write 26-6-25. So if you see the day and month flipped on the coin, red flag. Now one red flag may not be enough to walk away from a deal. Although if you're smart, in my opinion, it probably is. There are international sellers, but you'll have verification that they have done this before within the group. But multiple red flags in a given deal, not good. If you're having a conversation with somebody about a card on Messenger and their use of the English language grammatically is real wonky, and you've got a couple of these other red flags, probably a good idea to stay away. I've seen a lot more issues with Kyles and Brads and Chads in the States than I have people that have calendars out ordering. We're talking about overseas scamming right now. But to that point, if you see a lot of bruh, a lot of bro, a lot of my guy, real early on in a conversation, little bit of a red flag, maybe a pink flag. Another one, and Jason's going to punch me and say, you can't say that, but I'm going to say it. Oh, great. I can't wait for this. We shouldn't in general judge a book by its cover. But if your profile pic looks like you might have smoked all the meth, I'm not interested in doing business with you. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Is that fair? That's just a weird one to get hung up on, but I'm going to keep it moving. Let's switch gears. eBay, believe it or not, it's usually the sellers being scammed in that situation, not the buyers. eBay does not care. I've done a video on this. I did one on eBay Standard Envelope and the failure that it has been for many sellers at the high volume, low end with their insured and tracked eBay Standard Envelope service. I've also spent countless hours on the phone with customer service, eBay acknowledging, yes, you did everything the right way, noted you did not mistreat the customer. Yes, that's what we were hoping the customer would experience. Still not removing the feedback, still not making it right. Don't care about your metrics. Just deal with it. We're eBay. Really common scams are replacing the card. Let's say there's a $100 low end Brady rookie that if it's clean, maybe it goes to $200 or $300. That's a price point. What's the authentication price threshold now? $250. That would be a great example of it. As the buyer, you own a card, that exact same card, but it has a crease in it. It's hard to see on the light, but whatever. You buy a really clean copy that's advertised as near mint, you believe it's a PSA 9, which in this case for that card would double the value. As soon as the card arrives, you say, hey, the card you sent me is damaged. Item not as described or item arrived damaged are really harsh penalties for the metrics of sellers on eBay. They have to do anything they can to avoid that type of feedback hitting them or that type of metric hitting their profile. The scammer will reach out, I can't believe this is such a nice card. Why didn't you take the pictures right? Why didn't you tell me it was in this condition? You know that you properly shipped it. There was more cardboard in there you can imagine. It was taped up. It was in a box. There's no way. It's not the same card. You're screwed. You're just screwed. There are things you can do to mitigate it. Yeah. Take really good pictures of your cards when you list them. There's very difficult for especially older cards to have the exact same centering. In this type of a scam that Jason's talking about, one of the easiest ways you can combat it is you can say politely, hey, it's really strange because I know I packed the card well, but the card you're sending me pictures of, if you look at it and then look at the pictures that are listed on my listing, you'll see that the card you're sending me pictures of, the centering doesn't match. It's heavier left to right or it's heavier top to bottom. The corner was a little dinged in mine, it was very clear in the picture I even stated it in. There's a crease over here, but there's not that ding in the corner. Are you sure it's the same card? A lot of times with scammers, not always, but a lot of times they're looking for opportunity, not a fight. If they see that you're going to actually fight them on it, sometimes they'll back off. It's kind of like walking down a street at night in the dark. If you look nervous and you look like you're weak, there's a lot better chance you're going to get jumped than if you're six foot four and you walk like you don't care. I mean meth and walking down alleys, we're giving it all to you. There are ways in your business policies on eBay to decide who's allowed to buy from you. If this is something that keeps happening to you, you can say, I don't want anybody who has not paid for an item or asked for a cancellation in the last three months. You can say, I don't want anybody that has less than a hundred reviews. You can say, I don't want anybody that has the type of ... Now, you're limiting your space. There are good hearted idiots out there that didn't understand how eBay works that like to buy your card. You're eliminating the possibility of that sell as well. But if you want to really get down to it, there are some metrics that you can set up with your store to limit the type of buyer or qualify the type of buyers that are allowed to purchase from you. So it's just something to be aware of. Now if you flip the coin and go to whatnot, it's the complete opposite. Protecting the seller. The seller has every way manageable screwing over the buyer right now and there are not a lot of protections in place. Yes, you can make a claim with whatnot, but if you have had to dance with the devil that is the AI customer service on whatnot, you know it's atrocious. Whatnot, you should really do something about that horrible AI engine that is running your customer service. One, it just tries to funnel everybody's questions to the wrong spot. Two, the buyer doesn't feel like there's any protection for them. Three, it kind of is rewarding the seller to just say, screw you, no cancellations. While whatnot's policy is no cancellations. I understand the reason for that. They're trying to keep it somewhat honest, but there is a hustle right now where if a buyer has gotten to 1,000 sales. Seller, you mean. Yes, seller. If a seller has 1,000 transactions, then after that point, every transaction is automatically funded or vested, whatever you would call it. They have access to those funds. The other thing you can do is let's say that, so Gary and I have over 1,000 sales. So now when we run a whatnot show on Thursday nights at 7 o'clock Eastern, 10 Slabs Given Away, you should check it out. As soon as the show's over, funds are available for us to begin the deposit to our bank account. If we wanted to, there's nothing stopping us from selling off $2,000 worth of low-end stuff that night, turning around, printing out the labels, and just doing nothing. The only thing stopping us is the threat of having our store shut down, which is what would happen. But if you don't care, if you did all the low-end stuff to get your store metrics to where you had access to that and then you run a monster show where maybe you do $30,000 and you're like, I'm out, peace, then you're there. Let Whatnot handle it. I'm out. One of the things that Whatnot is doing right now for people who do breaks is they are kind of putting some requirements in for second cameras and things like that. If you're just a single seller, now we usually at least one point during the thing, and we have this podcast, people know who we are anyway. That'd be a bad idea for us. For a lot of sellers on Whatnot, you never see their face. You see their hands, I guess if you recognize somebody's hands that well, but it's pretty anonymous from a seller standpoint, so be careful there. I think the hustle that's happening right now, it's a major problem, is you're supposed to be over 18 or the parent is observing you the whole time. That loophole is an issue, but you have 10 high school kids that start a page and they all grow the page together. They get to those 1,000 sales and then they print out the shipping labels and then crickets and their account is shut down. Whatnot makes it right. It's already in the bank. I don't know if they can reverse a deposit. I don't know how all that works, but they've got money to spend for a little bit, which By the way, guys, that's the story we were talking about. That's exactly what was happening with Mr. Smith. It's just happening on Whatnot and then three or two months later, they've all worked together on this other store and they've done the exact same thing and you can rinse and repeat it. Happened to me with an XRC Borough PSA 10, still mad about it, but the scam is out there, so be mindful on Whatnot. Make sure that they have some good reviews, that they've done several transactions. If they're doing sudden death auctions, 500 transactions is not a lot. If they're doing sudden death auctions, 50 reviews is not that many. If you want to mitigate risk, make sure they're established, they've been doing it for a while and they have good reviews. Yeah, and remember what Whatnot's platform is. For the vast majority of sellers on Whatnot, they're honest people just selling their stuff, but they're bad actors and anytime there are bad actors, they're going to look for the platforms that give them the best chance to get away with their bad acting. Currently, there's some things with Whatnot that allow for that, but Whatnot, their whole business model was where is eBay facing? selling sellers, let's reverse that. And live selling is, I don't think we realize how big it is and going to be for basic things going forward, not just the collectibles. When you run your yard sale, people will just be doing it live selling. One last thing. We didn't mention this before, you and I didn't talk about, but I think it's worth saying. There's a misnomer that bad customer service is the same thing as scamming, and it is not. There are a lot of collectors that will put somebody on blast. Maybe they were supposed to ship something within 48 hours, but it's been 72. Not 72 days, 72 hours. And they try to post that to a scammer's page, blah, blah, blah, and it was maybe over the weekend. There are times where the seller was refunding and they genuinely were confused at the amount because they forgot one of the cards and they shipped it over and they're still $7 off. Is that a scam? More than likely, it's just an idiot. It's not a scam or it's poor customer service, but for whatever reason, especially people new to the hobby are quick to use the word scam, scam, scam. There's plenty of scams out there. We made it really clear to you that there are a lot of them, a lot of different ways to do it, but there's a difference between somebody just having really crappy business practices, bad business, and it being a scam. I feel like that's important to establish. Yes, and it doesn't mean that you shouldn't make people aware of people who serially have bad business. If you're one of those people who has been accused of having bad business, let me tell you a little secret here. There's one way forward. Yeah. Well, one, own the mistake, but more importantly, 99% of these bad customer service things revolve around pure lack of communication. If I tell you I'm going to do something, then one of two things is going to happen. It's either getting done within the time that I said it was going to get done, or I'm communicating with you letting you know why it isn't and when it will be. And would you like to change the terms of our agreement because I told you this would happen? Yes. You can solve so many of the problems and headaches you may have as a non-full-time person who's just like, the one I see a lot of times when people say, this person didn't ship in the time. Well, I have a life. You expect me to, yes, if you have the time. To take my money. To take my money and you want to be paid quickly, then you should have the time to do what you say you're going to do. If you're not 100% sure you can ship it within two days, say, hey, is it cool if I get this shipped by Friday? Is it cool if I, give yourself the time and if the person buying it says, hey, like for me sometimes that won't work because I'm buying inventory for a show that weekend. I need it to go out on Monday so that I make sure I have it. If you can't get it out that day, just tell me. No big deal. We'll do business in the future maybe. But for this one, I needed it by this weekend. No big deal. Communicate with your customer. It solves a lot of problems. I had a seller that I've been buying heavily for eBay. I wouldn't say heavily. There have been a couple of sales. The first sale was, I try to bulk it out, like a really good spot. For those of you saying, I live here, I can't find any dime boxes, quarter sales, you have to have Facebook. You have to work. It's a no brainer. Go to all those groups. Literally search 0.25, 0.10, dime sale, quarter sale. They're out there. But I built out a huge purchase. They said they were going to ship it. That's like four or five days later. No shipping. I'm getting a light on eBay inventory. It's important to keep the machine running. That one's a little bit of pressure. I just reached out. I got the song and dance, well, here's the reason. I had this going on. I'm so sorry. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, okay, no problem. They said, can I expect you to buy from me in the future? I said, no, you won't. It's nothing personal, but I just need to know I can count on blah, blah, blah. They started asking once a week, could you give me another chance? Which I thought was kind of weird on bulk, dime, and quarter sales. Well, there's not as many people buying that stuff. And I said, no, I don't think so. And again, I don't want to keep carrying this on, but I just need to know that I can count blah, blah. So finally, they caught me on a day where I was super low on eBay inventory. And I was sitting at the airport. We're flying back. And they had a lot of the kind of stuff I like to put up. They shot another message. Please, can you blah, blah, blah. I said, all right, I'll give it another look. I make another purchase. It was on a Saturday. They're like, these will be shipped Monday. Perfect. I'll be sure to ship them Monday. Monday morning, they print the label. It doesn't go to the post office until Tuesday or Wednesday. Never another penny will come out of my pocket to them. It's just bad business. All right. Let's change the subject. It's been very negative. Let's talk about something positive. Low and liquid. Gary's going to throw some images up. But I want to talk to you about the 1992 Marvel masterpiece set. This is one that has been around for a while. Pretty iconic. There's like some Spiderman's in there. It's been around since like 1992, right? Yeah, but it's been around in the hobby, like relevant. When you think of non-sport, it's one that you see quite a bit. They've got the cool hollows in there. They're hard to find clean. Some of them fetch five to 10 bucks, but these have been a consistent drip for me every month. Several of them sell. Probably 10 to 20 will sell for me. Maybe a little less some, maybe more. It is one common with multi-quantity orders. The reason for that is they've been reproducing this set. They did a platinum version of this that has like super low number parallels. Some of them fetch a ton of money. Various options, acetate, all kinds of parallels and short prints in there, but it's been a really good one for me. You will find this at sales, and a lot of times it's a stack that you get in bulk. You gave me some. I've uploaded several hundred. You gave me probably another 150, 200 of them. I bought them to think about doing what you do with them, and I realized my brain just doesn't have the space for that stuff. You take it. You have fun with it. It's another non-sport one. Again, low in liquid. What can we find super cheap that sells at a high velocity, whether it goes for $2, $4, $5, $10, whatever? What will I churn through quickly? That's definitely one that I would keep an eye out for. In general, guys, the non-sport market is growing. It's growing really fast. I think one of the things that I'm really bad about this, I know you are. I get a little snobby with, well, if it's not sports, like a bunch of nerds, listen. The stuff sells. There are tons of comic book and non ... I'm excited about the SpongeBob Tops Chrome set that's coming out later this year. I will be buying some of that product. I know. Shake your head, but I will be. I can shake my head, but I'm selling stuff like that, and at the end of the day, people are buying autographs of Minnie Mouse. Yeah. Signed by Bob the Janitor. Nobody's thought through that, but it's happening. Yeah. For big dollars. It's happening. The market is not slowing down. That's a decent low in liquid for you. Keep an eye out for it. I would try to target in bulk. I would not pay up on that. Spider-Man is one that consistently like five to 10 bucks. It's tough to find them. The ink is like a full bleed, so the edges are going to be ... You're listing these in mostly EX condition based off of what I've seen, but that hasn't slowed people down from buying. Don't overprice this. It'll sit forever. Yeah. Price it competitively. Again, if you buy it for a dime, don't be greedy. Yeah. All right. Last segment of the episode, as always, is The Lookout. The Lookout this week is Chase Dillard of the Cleveland Guardians. If you're a long-time podcast listener, you will know that about a year ago, I spent a lot of time talking about this guy. He was the best player in the Guardians spring training camp in 2024, and it wasn't close. The fact that he didn't make the roster out of spring training was shocking to me. Evidently, the Guardians knew something that we didn't because about a month later, he broke his foot again. Chase Dillard, it's very simple. When he's on the field, he's one of the best overall hitters in minor league baseball. That is a big if, though. He has had a lot of injury issues. He was a first-round draft pick in 2022 out of James Madison, which I believe is a D3 school. Although, like you said, baseball is weird. Baseball can be kind of weird. I might be wrong there, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. Going into his senior year, he was a projected top five pick. There was even talk of him maybe being the number one pick, but he broke his foot and missed most of the year. Still was a first-round pick. It fell to 16. Came out of the gate and was just awesome. Had more foot problems. Got healthy again. Was really good. Then he had more foot problems. Now he's healthy again. He's in Triple-A in Columbus with the Clippers and raking, just absolutely raking, 20-25 so far this year, his slash line. I'm not counting his low-A rehab assignment for about 10 games before he came back up to Triple-A. He is hitting .297 with a .418 on-base percentage and slugging .486 for a .904 OPS. His career line is .308, .390, .509. He's a career .900 OPS guy. He's not going to hit 40 or 50 home runs, but he is going to hit 25 to 30, and he's going to hit 30 doubles, and he's going to hit for high average, and he's going to walk a lot, and he's not going to strike out a ton, and he's going to be a decent player in the outfield. If they want to really protect him, they just make him a DH. I think he's up no later than right after the All-Star break. The Guardians desperately need offense, and he's the guy they can bring up to give an instant jolt to that. You will find his first Bowman cards in 2022 Bowman draft. They are not cheap, but relative to what his performance is, they have not started to climb the way they will as that call-up gets closer and right after the call-up. So there's still some opportunity there. I would avoid base paper. I would just buy chrome non-auto color and base autos and higher-numbered autos. I wouldn't sink. I know I could buy a red right now, but I don't want to drop that kind of money into this guy because the foot scares me. It really does. But man, when he's healthy, he's awfully, awfully good. So that's our lookout for this week, Chase Dillard. We're hitting like 700 this year on call-ups from the time I talk to them to them getting called up. So a little pat on my back there. Nothing you like more than patting your own back. No, only when somebody else pats it, then I like it even better. Which is surprising to me how rough the mobility is when you have a golf club in your hand because you would think... Yeah, that I could do that? No, my body's shot. If only you could swing it like this. Too many years of... Yeah, that would work. Too many years of football. Hey, quick reminder, 7 o'clock Thursday nights on WhatNot, 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. We're giving away 10 slabs every week. We're giving away 20 giveaways, but we have some really nice stuff in the juice box for the next month. Be sure to check that out. If you haven't, like, subscribe, follow, do that. This has been the Ball Card Show, the Esports Podcast. For the Esports Collection. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.