Gotta scam em all
Sep. 26th, 2024 19:12I was curious, so I looked a little bit more into the "currency trading cards" I stumbled on the subreddit for the other day. These all come from a website called cardsmiths.com. My first thought was "oh, maybe this is more innocent than I thought." The currency cards were front-and-center, but they also sell trading cards for licensed properties like The Golden Girls, Bob Ross, and Street Fighter. If they managed to get a license as wholesome as The Golden Girls, surely they can't be all bad. My spouse loves that show, so I even briefly thought that I might get her some as a fun gift.
Well, the wholesome licenses are a smokescreen, it's just as shady as it looks. The first red flag is the big "we accept cryptocurrency!" Banner that's always at the top of the screen. Okay they have one product aimed at crypto weirdos, but maybe the rest of it is normal.
The second red flag is the price. The cheapest set of Golden Girls cards you can get is $20, and I wasn't sure at first how many cards you get for that price. The SKU label is "2-pack collector's box" which I initially thought meant you get 2 cards in a fancy box, which would be unhinged. You have to zoom in on the box to see what you actually get. "2 packs per box, 5 cards per pack". (This seems to be the base quantity across the board, I don't think they sell individual 5-card packs.)
10 cards for $20 is $2 per card, which might be acceptable if this was like a boutique, limited-run novelty set where you're buying the whole set at once, but if they're being mass-produced at a level where they sell blind packs, that's totally outrageous. Magic: The Gathering packs have shot up in price in recent years, but a booster pack of the most recent expansion works out to about $0.43 a card. You also get a decent discount for buying in bulk: a box of 36 booster packs is $175, which works out $0.35 a card, or about 20% cheaper than base price. Still not exactly a thrifty buy, but hey, at least with these cards you get to play a game.
You can also get the Golden Girls cards in bulk. The biggest box you can get is a "master case" of 48 boxes. Each box contains two packs of 5 cards, so 480 cards.
The master case of Golden Girls cards costs $950. $1.98 a card. A whopping 2% cheaper than buying individual boxes.
Fucking bonkers.
Look, trading cards have been around since the 1860s, and it's always been a little exploitative. Baseball cards were a sleazy way to separate kids from their pocket money. But they weren't an outright scam. Kids weren't buying them to collect a whole set, or as an "investment", they were buying them to collect the players they like, or the teams they like. There is entertainment value in trading with your friends and trying to get the cards you want. But this is a perversion of that. No one should ever spend a thousand bucks on a box of cards. The only reason to do that is if there's an expectation that they will someday be worth more than that, but here's the thing: nothing sold as a collectible will increase in value.
Baseball cards and comics sold in the first half of the 20th century shot up in value precisely because they weren't seen as collector's items. They were a bit of fun for kids that got tossed out once the novelty wore off. The ones that weren't thrown away are now worth a lot of money, because there's a bigger market of people wanting to recapture a bit of childhood nostalgia than there are copies of those objects. Adults who saw this happen in the 80s and 90s thought this would be a repeatable phenomenon, and they stocked up on baseball cards and comics carefully saved in plastic sleeves and mylar bags, and now they have a bunch of worthless perfectly-preserved paper and cardboard. They're worth less than nothing, because if the comics were read and the cards were traded and enjoyed, they'd at least had entertainment value.
The objects from the 80s and 90s that became valuable collectibles are all the things no one thought was worth keeping around: computers and electronics and video games. You always threw out or sold or gave away the old thing when you upgraded to the shiny new thing. And now we're seeing a similar thing happening to video games that happened to comics in the 80s. People are selling physical copies of homebrew console games for $60-$100, and people are buying them as collectibles, because they're thinking "if only I held onto that copy of Magical Chase when I had my turbografx, it'd be worth thousands! Now I have another chance!" But everyone buying new homebrew or licensed reproduction carts are thinking exactly the same thing. They're all going to sit around on a shelf, barely if ever be played, and eventually become landfill.
Anyway, the third red flag is the submenu at the top of the page that says "redemption programs". Explore it and learn about the sketchy lottery that they're running on top of the base scam. Randomly inserted into packs of cards are cards you can redeem for varying amounts of cryptocurrency. No prize values or odds are given, but the example image has a card they claim can be redeemed for 1 bitcoin, so they at least want to plant the idea in your head that you might get a card theoretically worth $65,000 (at time of writing)
Now I'm not a lawyer, there might be something about this that makes it technically legal, maybe there's some loophole that says it's not considered a lottery if you're not giving away cash or physical goods, but even if it's legal, it's still sick. Fuck this company, and fuck whoever agreed to give them the Golden Girls license. Rose, Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia would've kicked your ass
Well, the wholesome licenses are a smokescreen, it's just as shady as it looks. The first red flag is the big "we accept cryptocurrency!" Banner that's always at the top of the screen. Okay they have one product aimed at crypto weirdos, but maybe the rest of it is normal.
The second red flag is the price. The cheapest set of Golden Girls cards you can get is $20, and I wasn't sure at first how many cards you get for that price. The SKU label is "2-pack collector's box" which I initially thought meant you get 2 cards in a fancy box, which would be unhinged. You have to zoom in on the box to see what you actually get. "2 packs per box, 5 cards per pack". (This seems to be the base quantity across the board, I don't think they sell individual 5-card packs.)
10 cards for $20 is $2 per card, which might be acceptable if this was like a boutique, limited-run novelty set where you're buying the whole set at once, but if they're being mass-produced at a level where they sell blind packs, that's totally outrageous. Magic: The Gathering packs have shot up in price in recent years, but a booster pack of the most recent expansion works out to about $0.43 a card. You also get a decent discount for buying in bulk: a box of 36 booster packs is $175, which works out $0.35 a card, or about 20% cheaper than base price. Still not exactly a thrifty buy, but hey, at least with these cards you get to play a game.
You can also get the Golden Girls cards in bulk. The biggest box you can get is a "master case" of 48 boxes. Each box contains two packs of 5 cards, so 480 cards.
The master case of Golden Girls cards costs $950. $1.98 a card. A whopping 2% cheaper than buying individual boxes.
Fucking bonkers.
Look, trading cards have been around since the 1860s, and it's always been a little exploitative. Baseball cards were a sleazy way to separate kids from their pocket money. But they weren't an outright scam. Kids weren't buying them to collect a whole set, or as an "investment", they were buying them to collect the players they like, or the teams they like. There is entertainment value in trading with your friends and trying to get the cards you want. But this is a perversion of that. No one should ever spend a thousand bucks on a box of cards. The only reason to do that is if there's an expectation that they will someday be worth more than that, but here's the thing: nothing sold as a collectible will increase in value.
Baseball cards and comics sold in the first half of the 20th century shot up in value precisely because they weren't seen as collector's items. They were a bit of fun for kids that got tossed out once the novelty wore off. The ones that weren't thrown away are now worth a lot of money, because there's a bigger market of people wanting to recapture a bit of childhood nostalgia than there are copies of those objects. Adults who saw this happen in the 80s and 90s thought this would be a repeatable phenomenon, and they stocked up on baseball cards and comics carefully saved in plastic sleeves and mylar bags, and now they have a bunch of worthless perfectly-preserved paper and cardboard. They're worth less than nothing, because if the comics were read and the cards were traded and enjoyed, they'd at least had entertainment value.
The objects from the 80s and 90s that became valuable collectibles are all the things no one thought was worth keeping around: computers and electronics and video games. You always threw out or sold or gave away the old thing when you upgraded to the shiny new thing. And now we're seeing a similar thing happening to video games that happened to comics in the 80s. People are selling physical copies of homebrew console games for $60-$100, and people are buying them as collectibles, because they're thinking "if only I held onto that copy of Magical Chase when I had my turbografx, it'd be worth thousands! Now I have another chance!" But everyone buying new homebrew or licensed reproduction carts are thinking exactly the same thing. They're all going to sit around on a shelf, barely if ever be played, and eventually become landfill.
Anyway, the third red flag is the submenu at the top of the page that says "redemption programs". Explore it and learn about the sketchy lottery that they're running on top of the base scam. Randomly inserted into packs of cards are cards you can redeem for varying amounts of cryptocurrency. No prize values or odds are given, but the example image has a card they claim can be redeemed for 1 bitcoin, so they at least want to plant the idea in your head that you might get a card theoretically worth $65,000 (at time of writing)
Now I'm not a lawyer, there might be something about this that makes it technically legal, maybe there's some loophole that says it's not considered a lottery if you're not giving away cash or physical goods, but even if it's legal, it's still sick. Fuck this company, and fuck whoever agreed to give them the Golden Girls license. Rose, Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia would've kicked your ass
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