Reminder you are also giving up all your legal recourse by sending it back. If there is ever a class action or something like that by even sending in your card you are giving up your right to participate
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I think, instead of keeping a forgery, Iâd rather pick up one of my grails that were always too expensive to justify in a CGC slab. To celebrate, and to show them some love for handling this properly. That card can represent this whole debacle for me.
Thatâs when I get the money back. Sweating bullets until then, worried this is still destined to go wrong for me somehow.
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You are still conflating the consumers choice. You can be vocal about how a company needs to resolve their problem, and then separately, as the consumer who was wronged, chose what to do with that resolution. The consumer in this situation has no obligation to CGC or anyone but themselves.
Also, right now it hasnât been confirmed that cards bought from Goldin or Heritage will be refunded. The consumer has to weigh the risk of surrounding their legal recourse for something that has yet to be confirmed.
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I see it differently but Iâll agree to disagree on this point.
I wasnât aware cards bought from either Goldin or Heritage were not confirmed to be refunded yet. That is a fair point as to why someone would still want to hold on to their prototypes.
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Something I should emphasize, no one is winning. While members are debating potentially keeping a card, for a variety of reasons, the throughline for everyone is this is awful. The betrayal of trust from a grading company, to a top pokemon employee will have ripple affects over time. Especially people who bought directly from akabane, or even met irl. Even innocently looking through old pokemon books and seeing akabanes face is now a negative.
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Been following this story for a while as an uninvolved party, finally created an account to jump into the conversation, specifically to talk about the value of cards that donât get sent in - either by choice or because theyâre not eligible.
I can say for sure that there will definitely be demand for them after all of this eventually dies down. Enough demand not to send in refunds for items which are eligible? Cant say for sure, but leaning towards probably not. But, there will definitely be people interested in buying ones that canât be sent in, either because they were purchased from the owner directly or because they werenât even graded by CGC in the first place. I know there will be because Iâm personally going to want to buy at least one for myself, as someone who collects things exactly like this (though normally for Yugioh).
I would also like to point out that, funnily enough, it will be easy to verify ungraded copies as being the ones printed as part of this scandal, by the exact same metric they were caught by: the printer information. You canât make new ones today because theyâll have 2025 dates, meaning they wonât match the same range as the ones that were graded. Thatâs how I plan to verify any I buy, at any rate.
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I still have my copy of this issue. itâs a good keepsake now!
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Everyone has different values on items, be it monetary or historical or sentimental.
If you are not attached to the monetary value of it, in a few years, these will have historical value even if it was tired to bad history. Thereâs really no argument to be made on why someone should or shouldnât keep it.
Except for @pfm, I do believe keeping the slab that was the used to start this whole thing would be a great historical and sentimental value, watching smpratteâs video of you two jokingly talking about the slab felt like we were there.
Itâs good to see people that want their money back can get it back. What a crazy ride this whole thing has been.
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I wonder if this will open a new can of worms where people fake CGC slabs, and make fakes of the fakes because people will buy them?
Maybe CGC will have a service to authenticate fake slabs?
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âYo CGC⌠My fake fake slab is fake! What the heck!â 
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So we went from âWHERES MY REFUNDâ to âMaybe I make more money from thisâŚâ
You guys sound like Vert. Shame on you! (this was a joke btw)
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âShamingâ people is kind of embarrassing
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The joke went right over your head didnât it @fazool?
Why would I shame people for buying something they didnât know was a scam, especially if it was backed by a employee of the pokemon? I didnât even know it was fake until PFM said so and I was fooled also. I would be in the same predicament if I had money and it was a rayquaza card.
If I were you, Iâd keep at least one for sentimental value (given the significant role you played in exposing this scam). That is the point of collecting after all (at least for me); cards tell a story and have memories associated with them. Obviously, I canât speak for you, but I suspect if you didnât keep one . . . youâll wish you had one day.
On a sidenote, you can always have it studded with diamonds and wear it to conventions and events like Logan Paul . . .
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unless you purchased directly from Akabane and your cards were not yet graded by CGC. Still wondering if thereâs gonna be any legal accountability/closure to the other layer of this story. 
Repeating my question if someone can answer
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Through CGC
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When you guys share your cgc refunds, can you also mention if they are protos, alpha, beta, or deltas?
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PFM and the members of elite fourum have put in countless hours of detective work uncovering this fraud and now helping to return millions of dollars to collectors. If youâve benefited from this forum, please consider making a donation today to help with server costs, especially since all the eyes on this thread have led to increased traffic. Thank you!
https://ko-fi.com/pkmnflyingmaster
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I agree. I also think this is like keeping or buying prototype/bootleg cards that came of of factories who WOTC tried to contract with.