That $300 variant cover bundle almost ruined my weekend at the local con

I figured buying a bundle of variant covers from a dealer would be a safe bet since I’ve done it before. Paid $300 cash for a set of 10 supposedly rare issues from a seller named Dave at the Atlanta Comic Expo last Saturday. Got home and realized four of them were reprints with forged stamps on the back. He was gone by Sunday morning and I couldn’t get my money back. Has anyone else run into fake cover variants from traveling dealers?

2 comments

2 Comments

abby_kim5527d ago

Hold on now, maybe you need to look at it from the dealer's side. Dave might have bought those reprints in good faith from a distributor and didn't know they were fake. Conventions are chaotic, stuff slips through the cracks all the time. It's easy to blame the traveling seller, but you also handed over $300 cash without asking for a receipt or proof of authenticity on the spot. Some dealers offer a 24 hour guarantee if you check the books right away, and it sounds like you didn't do that. Variant bundles are always a gamble because you're banking on a seller's word, not a certificate of authenticity. So maybe this is more on you for not being thorough than on Dave for having a bad batch.

williamd7027d ago

Wait, "handed over $300 cash without asking for a receipt"? Did you actually just say that like it's normal? Who carries that much cash to a comic convention and just hands it over for a bundle of books with no paperwork at all? That's not "not being thorough", that's basically asking to get taken advantage of. I've been hitting cons for years and I always ask for some kind of receipt, even if it's just a handwritten note on a business card. And the 24 hour guarantee thing is a joke too, because most people don't crack open every single book until they get home. You can't flip through a sealed variant bundle on the floor, that's the whole point of buying it as a bundle. So blaming the buyer for not catching fakes in a sealed pack is just wrong.