Definitely a solar eclipse.
Upper Deck was the king of sports trading cards and even though they were making hundreds of millions in the 80s, they got caught creating counterfeit versions of the most desirable cards to make even more money. Once they got caught there wasn’t much to be done as it wasn’t actually illegal for them to do so. It soured the collectors market for a long long time.
Circle back around to around 2000 and upper deck somehow got a license to print Yugioh cards in Europe. Only, they decided to start also making counterfeit cards of the 10 most desirable cards and made 50K of each of them and started seeding the collector market in the US by selling them in the states to make even MORE money. It wasn’t long before they got caught and then sued and settled out of court for some insane amount of money.
Somehow they’re still around and printing sports cards. It’s kind of mind boggling.
How can the manufacturer of those cards make counterfeit cards? Wouldn’t they still be real cards but just diluting the market?
I think you may be conflating fakes with counterfeits. While technically not “fake” cards they were fraudulent counterfeits. I know it’s muddy as frequently fraud and forgery and fake and counterfeit are used somewhat interchangeably colloquially but they aren’t all the same thing.
Counterfeit was the term they used in the lawsuit so I reflected that, though it’s usually used to imply a believable forgery. Counterfeit is the correct term but I can see the confusion as usually counterfeits are a fake product pretending to be real. This is a “real” product that is not supposed to be sold.
Upper deck was not licensed to make cards for the US market. Even if they were - they are not allowed to just print whatever cards they wanted. The ratios, print runs, and distribution were predetermined by Konami per their license and contract.
So they were printing genuine productions of the cards - but without a license to do so. Then they began selling those behind Konami in a market they weren’t permitted to distribute in. Upper deck took all the profit from those sales. That’s multiple levels of fraud.
I’m honestly surprised UD somehow managed to survive the lawsuit. Konami had a slam dunk. They had to have paid Konami some ungodly amount of money to get out from under that, not to mention the personal legal liability of whatever executives were involved in scheming up that fraud.
I wondered the same but then thought of this about Yugioh, they (card manufacturer) are producing cards but don’t own the rights to the characters. That belongs to whoever owns Yugioh. They probably had an agreement with YugiohCo to print a certain amount of each card and that would mean keeping rare cards rare. I guess the same thing could apply to baseball cards too. Between the card manufacturer and MLB. But I honestly have no idea.
Fancy Steakhouse in my old neighbourhood was always empty. Went there twice and the only other people were a bunch of black suits talking with the owner in a separate seating area behind glass doors.
Third time I went, the place had been shut down with a federal seal on the door.
Good steak though, in hindsight maybe human, who knows.
Wells Fargo was my bank until they opened secret accounts in my name and stole my money.
Basically Wells Fargo opened extra accounts I didn’t know about and charged me a bunch of made up fees. I eventually received a few hundred out of a class action many years later.
This happened to me too. I got charged 100s of dollars because my second checking account I didn’t know I had was overdrafted. Fuck Wells Fargo.
This reminds me that I had to sign one of those code of conduct documents at work last week.
I’m all for preventing corruption etc, but I have to say I am disappointed I have not once been offered a bribe. I’m not even asking for much, just one tiny bribe would be nice. Just to know I’m valued. You know?
