Yep it is all about identifying as many books as possible that fall within the suspect time span that CGC identified. Nothing more nothing less.

One of the best guys around in the hobby, Sterling Smith, just made a great post on the CGC boards that summarizes the situation nicely.



As far as I'm concerned, the message coming from CGC is:

"We don't care. It's your problem."

It's clear that CGC has not had a policy in place in order to follow up one of the worst situations they ever faced. Even their VP seemed muddled and confused. We await their new policy statement.

My favorite quote of 2009 so far:

"What harm could come from Jason selling books now?" - Richard Evans

On February 22, 2005, Jason Ewert sold a copy of Haunt of Fear #17(#3) on eBay using his "ejaenter" account. The book was a CGC Universal 7.5 with a certification number of 0093330012.

The very next book on the submission invoice after the HOF#17(#3) was a copy of Black Magic #1. It received a certification number of 0093330013.

That copy of Black Magic #1 was first acquired via Heritage Auction Galleries as a CGC Universal 7.5 (VF-). The book was apparently manipulated and then recertified at a higher Universal grade of 9.4 (NM) on January 18, 2005. It was consigned in a May 2005 Heritage auction but failed to sale.

Both books are suspect and fall within the recall period.

Reference Links
Acquisition: Black Magic #1 (Prize, 1950) CGC VF- 7.5
Liquidation: Black Magic #1 (Prize, 1950) CGC NM 9.4

While we're waiting for CGC to unroll their policy on the suspect books list, please note that this book, a Ewert submission appeared for sale this morning on a leading dealer website. These possibly tainted books continue to be offered to an unsuspecting public. Was previously, but no longer, in a CGC registry set.

Fantastic Four #79 CGC 9.6 White pages cert. #0098435010 graded on November 11, 2004. Of the 13 books originally submitted in this group, 8 were removed from the census. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Here's an interesting case of a Ewert submission that was graded a bit earlier than CGC's window and has moved between Registry sets:

Batman #261 CGC 9.4 OW to W pages. cert. #0080522009 graded on 4/7/2004

This book was originally sold on Ebay in September of 2006 after residing in a CGC Registry set. Eventually the second owner placed it for sale on a well known consignment site in 2008. It was purchased in April of 2008 and placed in yet another CGC Registry set where it currently resides. The gift that keeps on giving!



We recommend that any future transfer or sale be accompanied by the disclosure of the information regarding the original submission.

We see our friend Dover has discovered he has some books on the list. We were going to get around to contacting you shortly, D.... if you have any questions, just pm me!

Brad

Is that Ben?

Gary, I thought you might be interested in some parallel thoughts on this that I had:

I will be ramping up my efforts to work with anyone who wishes to level the playing field for the buyer. And that includes CGC, if they are willing to work with someone who will not make ANY compromises in the pursuit of ethically conducted business practices. I will continue to use any technology available to me to present the information needed for consumers to make INFORMED choices.

This could have been an opportunity to take the high road of total disclosure and transparency. It could have been a day when CGC won back all the doubters. If CGC chooses not to reveal further information at this time, then they should not complain if speculation explodes.

All the facts will come out. I can guarantee that. Whether in this forum or in others. This is indeed the tip of the iceberg, and we are much closer to the beginning of this story than the end.

I wish CGC good luck. They're going to need it.

I made that post on September 30, 2005 on the CGC boards in the linked thread below, which is very sobering in retrospect.....

http://boards.collectors-society.com/ub ... 81&fpart=1

We thought that while we were waiting to hear what CGC's new policy is on the suspect books we'd speed things up a little by posting the first thirty books in the list we compiled. Each one of these 30 books was found either for sale on or sold from a dealer site (4), or currently residing in a registry set (26). We will of course not reveal collectors or dealers names.

We'll add another 30 books a day to the list. This is being done in the absence of any real information or updates from CGC.

http://www.macartistry.com/networkofdis ... /blues.htm

Every one of these books falls within the suspect time period CGC said they would review and check books in. If you own one of these books, please contact CGC to verify their free check.

BTW... a shout out to Dover who posted today......



We're a little confused and hope Dover can clarify... the copy of Superman 233 CGC 9.6 that is in his registry set (#0035617009) did not appear on our master list to begin with. Does he have another copy of the same book?

Can someone pm him and ask him this? Thanks.

Dover - why don't you check in here and save yourself some trouble!

Wow, a whole new world! My wife is not going to like this.
Yes, I was wrong. I was reading the list, finding books on it (my All Star Westerns, PS 18) getting mad and when I saw the Superman 233 in 9.6 I paniced. Old label, zoomed in on my scan and saw the last three numbers were the same 009, I lost it and did not read all the numbers. How many Supererman 233 in 9.6 have the same last three digits? My mistake, and a good one.
Thanks to Ghost Town for the heads up.

that's mine! bought on Clink.

do you have a list of what registry owners have that are suspect? If you do, I want to know. Mine are put away so I use scans to determine the numbers, but if someone could tell me which of my books were suspect and needed to be verified, I'll take it.
I did send a list of what I thought were my five (now 4) to CGC for their initial verification.

Welcome! It's been frustrating seeing you post over at CGC Boards without being able to contact you. I'll send you a pm with the books of yours I found.

Brad


PS.... PM sent.

We read with interest stalkinggoat/4Gemworks Comic Emporium's reaction on the CGC boards to the presence of Ewert purchases in his collection. The good news is that five of the six books he placed with ComicLink for auction have been cleared as Ewert submissions. That became clear as the invoice number for that group (which included a couple of books Ewert sold on Ebay) sits in isolation outside of many of the clusters of invoice numbers. Congrats to stalkinggoat and thanks to ComicLink for taking pre-emptive action on these books. Information is good. Action is better.

The bad news, is that there are more Ewert submissions in your collection, GS/4G. We will be more than happy to supply you (free of charge) a list of those remaining books (which DO belong to submission groups that cluster amidst sequential invoice numbers) and which will not likely be dismissed as non-Ewert submitted. A few were graded much earlier than the CGC - issued window for suspect books, but that still leaves a number that should definitely be checked out.

If any collector had wanted to do the research on their own collection it would have been possible, but tedious. In a way, the discouraging aspect of the research may have been what CGC was counting on. We have done the research. This is only the first phase.

Stalkinggoats reaction is not surprising. It's a hassle. It's a pain. And he is free to disagree with the methodology we have followed. But think about it...what better way to bring the situation to the forefront? We've managed to inform the community without disparaging collectors or dealers. If we had just issued our finding in one huge chunk, with all 450 "finds" there would have been panic in the streets. CGC's phone would have been ringing off the hook, the CGC registry would have been frozen, and dealer sites might even experience a slowdown in business. That was not our goal.

It's not practical to contact each collector individually. We have when contact info was available. And to do so for the whole list would have been to support CGC's hush-hush policy on all of this, which we disagree with strongly. If you can imagine a huge tortoise sticking it's head into it's shell every time the opportunity comes to do something truly altruistic and good for the collecting community, and do it without the regard for its own bottom line, then you have a good analogy for the company in Sarasota.

Again, Stalking.... please contact us via pm here on these boards for the rest of your list of Ewert submitted holding. Even if you're not concerned, as you sell those books off, they go out into the collecting community and end up in the hands of another collector who doesn't know what he or she has purchased.

If not for yourself, do it for your fellow collectors.

In closing, I would save your irritation for the trimming practitioners (whoever they may be) and CGC, for never properlly addressing this situation after much chest thumping and ballyhoo at the beginning.

Hi Pov -

I see the fact that I didn't answer this question amidst all the other postings here concerns you. My apologies. I'll answer it with this:

After three years of CGC stonewalling on this, I have personally given up on expecting CGC to take action on this. So I am taking this case directly to the collecting community. I also know that CGC is 100% aware of this thread and of the issues involved. The have been, for over three years. What is there that I could tell them that they don't already know? That books that Ewert submitted are still out there in collections?

Pov, you've known my position right from the start: I approach these issues from a consumer advocacy direction. CGC has had countless opportunities to correct the Ewert submission situation.

What hasn't worked for the average collector, is the quiet cellphone call, the private chat, the courteous chummy exchange. Nothing ever gets done. Frankly, I'm not particularly concerned with what is in CGC's best interests at this point. They watch out for their own interests quite nicely thank you. What I am interested in is raising awareness among collectors.

I think the nature of this presentation has been extremely successful in that mission.

POV.... this entire thread is the essence of proactivity. If you want to join up and help implement some of the many suggestions you had for NOD in your post across the street, we could sure use some help!

Brad

PS.... CGC has had three years to take proactive action on the Ewert books. What makes you think they would have been open to something now? CGC has had this information for years. Their total silence publicly since this issue was re-introduced on January 1 says everything.

It's concrete clear what their position is on this. They're going to do what they did last time. Nothing. And hope it goes away again.

Brad could you copy and paste what Pov posted please?

Pov with respect to Brad's request for you to join, if you do have any interest at all I will pay your membership fees. NOD does require many more members which have ideas that can move our organization ahead and are open to working with us to that end. I have read some of your postings in the past at the CGC forums and feel that you could add a great deal of ideas and experience to these boards. You also have a very congenial posting method which I greatly respect.

Mitch, please tell me that that Black Magic example above will end out in the GoD. My jaw hit the floor with that one.

Hi Aaron,

I think POV should handle the copy and pasting.... Hopefully he'll be back. I'd recommend he do that in one of the other more general "Suggestions for NOD" threads, as I would like to keep this thread on topic.

BTW.... Dover had a good outcome.... CGC is asking him to send four of the books we pointed out to him, down to Sarasota for checking. Thus, our goal of getting more Ewert subbed books out of the system progresses well.

POV is more than welcome to post the same thing here in the NOD Q&A thread.

Flaming Telepath (Nick) got his answer from CGC on his Ewert subs:

Hey Brad,

I agree the core of the thread is proactive: listing numbers, issues, dates of submission etc. And the thrust of the thread was a reactive action to how CGC handled it. Often reactive IS the parent of proactive. That is not what I meant here, though.

I simply meant, now that all this has been/is being detailled, have any officials of the Network Of Disclosure contacted CGC, linked them here and sought their cooperation formally?

But if you say things like "I have personally given up" or "What is there I could tell them" you are taking it personally, reacting to your frustration, and an opportunit may have been lost because of that. But I DID specify an officialbe contacting CGC, and am curious if this has actually happened..

Just a clarifying thing: I actually, did not know who you were when I first came here. I suck at names and actually never knew your name on the CGC boards beyond "Brad". You sent me a Hello PM when I first posted and I sent you a hello back but it was only a few days ago I found out it was you. So Hey Brad!

Pov, again.... from my perspective, CGC has had three years to set this right. It was my judgement that a call to CGC to alert them of this thread personally would be seen as antagonistic by them. That's how they react. There is a long track record in place of how they handle things like this. They hunker down, go draw the wagons into a circle, go silent and stall .... for as long as possible.

The bottom line is that it's a moot issue now. Collectors are contacting CGC on a one-by-one basis and getting questions answered by Harshen. That is more movement on this situation than there has been in three years. I've been working on this for a month, and I am 100% satisfied on how it was rolled out. It might end up being one of the most effective consumer protection efforts seen in a couple of years. There is a lot of work to be done.

CGC is free to handle this particular situation as they feel best. My only concern was to alert the collecting community as to the current situation.

Meanwhile, the relentless NOD-bashing continues on CGC's chatboard.

Brad

Even when you give them "facts" in black and white and roll it out as "information purposes" there are still people that attack and say it's all a bunch of tinfoil cap wearing conspiracy theorists with an agenda.

So trying to assist collectors of something never truly dealt with properly is an agenda. Is there too much sugar in the Kool-Aid lately

I have been gone for a minute. But this has got to be oe of the best threads I have read in ages. I feel bad for the people who have the Ewert books, but at least this is being brought to light. I think "the people" need to know this! Great work putting this together. This is one of the reasons I joined NOD, to learn!

Thanks Patrick!

Brad:

I just wanted to take the time to say you are doing a fantastic job on this project, and it is greatly appreciated.

Mike