@AndorfRequissa agreed, really unprofessional and i dont buy their excuses either.
i think they did what they did very purposefully and they were trying to scam that older gentleman out of his money from the start. every move they made aims to obfuscate, push the guilt onto others and make off with the money.
So i believe, at least
i share in your beliefs. some people call me cynical but i try to see the world for what it is. we had a guy locally that ripped off a ton of people off a collectible store that was alot of local conisgnment and stuff but all the people that got ripped off were for alot less than 200k. I think that is what makes this one a little more interesting but also points to a process that is often used on smaller consignments when packaging alot of product.
The old saying was that posession is 9/10ths the law and while modern law does have some protections in place for theft that the old days didn't there is alot that goes wrong here. i like to say Ive studied human behavior enough to be able to see patterns based off human behavior probabilities.
Heres the thing most people know when consulting with a lawyer. Corporations have been deemed alot of the same protections as people. There is a process for both parties and the legal system knows the biggest barrier is money. Having lawyers on retainer and not using them is something that people try not to do in modern business.
Theres two types of crimes that get treated totally differently in US law. There is violent crimes and crimes that are person to person abuses of power and then their is the white collar crimes that are economical abuses from person to person most often classified in the subdomain of person to corporation/person.
The legal system tends to favor the corporation/person statistically for multiple reasons. Money of a corporation and access to write offs and other accounting techniques that a person doesnt statistically have the same access to allows the corporation and inflated value of money compared to the average person.
The cost of data and paperwork put in a legal format to take something to court costs alot of money. Raw evidence is good but if its not formatted into legal format and processed through the costly process it has less of a chance of winnning because the legal format and and paperwork process is the most important part of successful uses of the court.
The court has alot of processes to delay and lengthen a process to ensure a fair judgement is deemed closed. In the nature of legal issues with a corporation there is a common practice that corporations use to weaken a case. Delay cases to mitigate the potential damage. The longer the delay the less of a probability that a judge is going to find a corporation liable.
Because of some of these processes there is an industry of businessman that have lawyers on their side and money to be able to use a predatorial process on the regular guy who isnt collecting data and formatting it into a legal format that is ironclad like a corporation with lawyers behind it.
Bricks and Minfigs CEO activity imo showed when looking at the raw footage of the conversations being had that they were aware of some of these statistical loopholes and were fine with screwing over the little guy knowing that they had the power to do wrong and be legally protected by loopholes to limit that damage comperatively.
This makes a wolf in sheeps clothing in legal standards imo and in modern society you have to be careful how you associate with especially in the consignment business because Bricks and Minifigs isnt the only company that knows this. They are just one of the biggest to scale that has been caught using these legal loopholes to theive from an individual or smaller entity without the same legal punching power.