Alright, so I’m giving the whole ‘buying and selling collectibles’ thing a go. And sometimes I have episodes that may be of interest to the casual observer. I have decided to begin chronicling these adventures in what I hope is an ongoing series. This one became a bit rambling as I felt the need to expound on ideas and concepts that will likely prove to be common points in the future. So this may also be a bit of a reference document as it shows part of my thought process for critically evaluating a purchase opportunity. Without further preamble, here is the pilot effort for Adventures in Yu-Gi-Oh.
This morning I browsed through the new listings on Ebay for Yugioh cards as I often do in search of cards that I want at prices that Can’t-Possibly-Lose™. When this listing caught my eye:
I think this is a really good price for these cards. But I have some stuff to check. First, I could be wrong and the listing looks familiar so why is it brand new as of today?
First things first, lets quickly check what DDS dark magician has been selling for by searching sold listings on Ebay.
Hmm, the most recent two sales for a PSA 9 DDS Dark Magician are also bundled with an 8 MFC Dark Magician Girl. The pictures are obviously taken in the same place by the same person. But how does he still have them if they sold? What’s going on here? All three listings are from the same seller account, so that removes a few possibilities as to why this is being relisted. Note the graded cards all have identical serial numbers so he doesn’t simply have multiples.
I decide to investigate.
One is an auction the others are Buy it Now (BIN). Lets look at the auction for something fishy.
Here are the bids. Aaand it looks shilled. If you’re not familiar with the word, its used to describe a bid that was made without intention to pay to have a fraudulent impact on the auction. There are many reasons why both buyers and sellers can make shill bids but for a seller the typical accusation is that the seller is bidding to raise the price of the auction to make his goods appear more valuable and increase what he receives. You might ask why such a seller wouldn’t simply use the ‘reserve price’ feature on Ebay and the answer is a combination of the fact that no reserve auctions get more attention and people are idiots. However, this seller does not appear to be pumping the price, more on that in a second. First, why is this clearly shilled?
The highlighted user has 0 feedback and the user name starts with a number. These are extreme red flags that this user account is phony. Most usernames begin with a letter because they are actual peoples names derived from email addresses or paypal accounts. Diving in to the user’s profile it’s becomes clear.
The dead giveaway is the ‘Bid activity with this seller: 100%’. The account was made purely to bid on this auction. Is it possible that one human found the listing of a lifetime and decided today was the day to make an ebay account? Yes. Is it possible that person wins and then the seller lists the exact same item the next day? Nah. We have to assume the seller made an account to win the auction.
Okay so the auction was fake. But why bother with this exercise? He didn’t pump the price. The bid history shows that the seller was bidding just barely over what other parties had bid. His later auctions were BIN at 3300 so maybe he was just looking for a BIN price? But why bother with that when an actual human had already bid up to 3250? It’s just so weird.
Lets look at the second listing of this item. Lol the description is funny:
SELLER COULD NOT PAY. The seller did win the auction so I guess this is just accidental honesty?
Listing 3 (current active listing says something similar)
What happened with listing 2? Unfortunately, Ebay doesn’t give hardly any information on sold Buy-It-Now (BIN) listings. There are third party tools that can tell you what the sale price is in the case when a ‘Best Offer’ is accepted which is the case here. So, let’s check that for giggles.
Slabwatch.com:
Okay so the seller accepted an offer for 3200 and then immediately relisted? Why? I honestly can’t make sense of this. If there were an issue with the listing, you can edit them. If you need to relist, you can take the listing down without it selling. Why would the seller go through the effort of fraudulently ending the Ebay listings only to repost them?
Often, in such a situation the easy answer is: the seller wants to give the impression of interest. By creating fake activity surrounding cards at a certain price one can accomplish at least two things. 1. Make the card seem more in demand and more liquid. 2. Add legitimacy to a price point.
Since potential buyers are likely to do exactly what I have done and look up prior sales to see what prices the card has moved at, sellers have an incentive to create fake sales to support their desired sale price.
Now, this motivation would seem to make sense at an abstract level, but here’s the thing: these cards are hype AF and this price is BELOW market. Look at these recent auctions for just the DMG:
The DMG alone is worth 66% the price this guy is asking. And Dark Magician Girl is arguably the safest bet in all of Yugioh. I might do a write up on this another time, but for now take my word for it Yugioh fans simp HARD for this card.
What about the Dark Magician? Well, it’s the DDS printing, a rare promo from the first release of the Dark Duel Stories video game. This game came with three promo cards, Dark Magician, Blue-Eyes White Dragon, and the head of Exodia in a very uncommon foiling pattern for North American cards. Subsequent production runs of the video game came with three different promos and so these first cards are actually pretty hard to come by and some of the most coveted cards in the hobby. Here are 2 DDS Dark Magician cards from the May PWCC auction.
A 10 went for 6200 and an 8 went for 1500. Of course, these auctions ended on May 27th. But while there are some indications that the market has softened some what in the past two months, big name cards like these have held their value. And given that I’m bullish on these things overall, I see no reason not to value a PSA 9 in the neighborhood of 3000 USD.
Which brings me back to our original question, what is going on here? To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything inherently suspicious about finding a good deal on Ebay. There are all sorts of reasons why someone would list cards at a bargain price. He might need the money asap so its effectively a fire sale. He might disagree with my assessment of their value. Or it could be simple ignorance. But whatever the reason for the price, why all the strangeness around relisting?
Well, at this point I decided to buy the cards. Worst comes to worst, he cancels on me and the deal doesn’t go through. Ebay buyer protections are pretty solid. (So solid, in fact, many folks argue it’s a risky platform for the seller) So I’m not at all worried about being scammed. I submit an offer for 3k to see what happens. And then suddenly it all made sense.
A blank Ebay message with an attachment:
Ohhhhhhhhhh he’s one of THESE guys. In the world of private deals, often times people look to improve their margins by not paying taxes and service fees. Of course, those fees exist to protect the buyer, maintain an above board tax situation, and to pay the service provider. I am one of the rare souls on these platforms who likes to stay protected and within the bounds of the law. So this kind of shit tends to skeeve me out. On Instagram, I’ve had many deals fall through because I was not willing to pay complete strangers with no reputation through PayPal’s ‘Friends and Family’ feature, which would offer me no recourse if the seller simply never sent me the merchandise I purchased.
Immediately, I figured that must be the scam. Lure people in with prices too good to be true then you offer to save the buyer a few dollars by doing the deal in the back alleyways where you rob him blind. OKAY, well obviously not letting that happen, but there are still possibilities here.
He might be true to his word. Sure, he’s trying to rob Ebay of their service fees. Notice he sent me a screenshot instead of a text message because Ebay scans messages for statements like this to discipline users who are frankly out to defraud them. But hey we all paid for Jeff Bezos to go to space so I’m not willing to call that a moral failing.
The most generous reading of his message is that he’s doing me a favor by lowering the price the only way he can. If that’s true, then me paying the full asking price of 3300 would make it a non-issue right?
And if he is a committed crook, I can at least force him to put his ebay account on the line a bit. Since the product is BIN, I decided to just pay the full asking price to see if he would just ship it.
Not so lucky. ☹
SIGH
I’m not feeling confident that this will go through, which is kind of a bummer, but I keep talking to the guy. Here is our back and forth:
Me: I understand and appreciate that, but I prefer the protection for this amount of money
Him: There’s a protection for PayPal too since they’re both sort of connected but I completely understand your concern. The other method will have protection and the money will not be fully transferred till the item arrives to you and you enter if it arrived or not. I will include the tracking number in the PayPal invoice so you’ll be able to track it to. I’ll put priority shipping so that more likely then not it’ll even arrive the next day. Can you add me on my insta so we can talk further about this so I can relieve you of your concerns.
Me: I assume you’re offering to go through paypal G&S but the thing is I’ve already paid through Ebay.
Him: Yes of course it’ll be goods and services or else you wouldn’t get the choice of a refund with the friends and family. If I cancel if from my end you’ll get the refund back. I’ve had it done to me plenty of times so I know by this point. Message me on insta and I’ll cancel it when you do and then I’ll send you the invoice and you just accept it when you want
Now, I’m starting to feel more confident actually. He wants to deal through PayPal’s Goods and Services (G&S) option, which surprised me because that’s still going to have fees and offer me the level of protection I require. If true, that’s a really good deal so I’m interested again. You may wonder whether or not the fees actually justify this guy trying this hard, but I’ll discuss that in a second.
He says he’ll throw in another card to sweeten the pot as well. It’s a vintage dark magician but is not particularly valuable. I don’t care about this addition but I message him on Instagram. He offers 3.2k for all three cards through goods and services express shipped. I agreed and he refunded me on Ebay. I am currently waiting on his PayPal info. And fully intend to go through with this because these prices are practically theft.
I’ll update this when / if anything changes and or the deal goes through and I receive the cards.
To end, lets examine exactly what these fees were that we worked so hard to avoid.
Ebay fees are actually quite substantial and vary by the category of the item being sold. For card game products, Ebay takes 12.35% of the final sale for the first 7.5k and 2.35% for the portion above 7.5k as well as a flat $0.30 on all sales. This comes out of the price on the seller’s end. So, when I hit BIN for 3.3k, the seller expected to receive 3300(1-.1235) -.3 = 2892.15. Shipping is ostensibly paid by the buyer through a separate fee. In reality, the seller might pay more or less than the number Ebay charges for shipping, for this discussion we’ll just assume that the seller expects to earn 0 from the shipping payment. Though for sake of completeness, the value could be positive or negative by a trivial amount.
For me the buyer, I also pay a significant amount, not in fees, but in taxes and shipping. The amount I paid after 3300 dollars came out to a total of 3535.49.
Paypal G&S is much better especially when doing everything domestic and with no currency exchanges. The buyer pays no additional fees unless using a credit card (which is a significant upcharge). And the seller pays just 2.9% plus $0.30 for each transaction. So, for our final price of 3200, the seller receives 3200(1-.029) -.3 -shipping = 3106.9 less shipping. I include shipping here because the buyer no longer pays a separate fee, and the seller agrees to eat that cost completely. Even if you pay for the best shipping, these lightweight cards end up being very cheap to send and you’ll notice that the seller nets roughly 200 dollars operating through PayPal compared to eBay even though the sale price is a hundred dollars lower. I as the buyer save over 300 dollars this way, on cards that are already priced at an incredible discount from my point of view. If all this goes through I really will owe this guy a thank you, but then again- I am still waiting on his PayPal information…