Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔓) PROOF UNLOCKED: America’s Video Game Scandal Continues: More Evidence of Deception By Grading Company WATA

I thought I was done reporting on this—but apparently it wasn’t done with me. I found a video from a few days ago that required I write this. sethabramson.substack.com/p/americas-vid…

1/ In the video—which I was watching because it was an interview with an independent journalist who’s done some great video game journalism, @karljobstgaming—the interviewer admits, during prep before the interview starts, to being friends with the head of WATA. And it matters.

2/ The problem was that I recognized this guy from an episode of Pawn Stars in which he appeared alongside the WATA head, Deniz Kahn. The two men showed no indication of knowing one another. I’d seen WATA a pull a stunt like this before, so I decided to investigate a little bit.

3/ And because, sadly, WATA is exactly what I and Karl Jobst have been saying it is—a company lacking any corporate ethics at the top—my intended several minutes of investigation quickly became further evidence of corruption inside the company. That’s how this article came about.

4/ When you’re a grading house responsible for grading, over time, *millions and millions of dollars* of merchandise, the one thing you can’t be caught doing is grading items while having a massive conflict of interest. It’s the sort of thing that can kill a grading company dead.

5/ I would be stunned if any grading company in the history of the American collectibles market has ever been caught grading items while under a massive conflict of interest as many times as WATA has been. I struggle to understand the basis for trusting this company.

6/ The sad thing is that I *like* WATA's product. As I've written many time before, I even own some of it. But what I can't for the life of me understand as a journalist, collector, or even an attorney is why the two men atop the company haven't been fired by Collectors Universe.

7/ The deception described in this article was known and understood immediately by the small cadre of high-end collectors—WATA allies, advocates and sometime advisers, but not employees—and yet the conspiracy of silence among these guys continued because they're all getting rich.

8/ A friend said to me recently that an unregulated market—like graded games, which the FTC is inexplicably ignoring, despite it being America's fastest-growing alternative asset class—needs only a small number of powerful people in it who are *neutral* on ethics to right itself.

9/ Such people—who aren't admirable so much as just *OK* people—can at least work to ensure that a market isn't rife with obvious corruption that makes the whole enterprise look bad and ultimately *harms* the value of items within it (which is what gets neutral folks to notice).

10/ Right now, this historically fast-growing market appears to have no one atop it with *any* interest in ethics. Not even a *self-interested* interest in ethics. And it's a damn shame, because fewer than five firings at some big-name entities could probably clean the market up.

(PS) Note that like every WATA story, this one just gets worse and worse. You may think you know exactly how bad it gets, but you have to read to the end to fully appreciate it.

(PS2) An esoteric point for those who read the article and also watch the DRob-Jobst-Curtin interview—in which Curtin says WATA's grading is "blind." Well, not exactly. We have high-end sellers on video saying they call WATA before sending in a big order, which kills that policy.

(PS3) Mark Wade at Certified Collectibles in Florida is on video (YouTube) repeatedly saying that he calls WATA when he has a big order going in, which means when his order arrives, WATA—which has *very* few employees—knows *exactly* where and who the games came from pre-grading.