Endless supply of resealed vintage vinyl on the market

It can be easy to reseal an LP and have it look like it has original shrink wrap. What is not easy is to have mint unplayed LPs that can pass as new never played or touched LPs with perfect covers with no wear. So it is one thing to do a reseal job, and another thing to have tons of mint unplayed records worth resealing.

Some LPs including promos got sealed up years ago, or decades ago by a distributor and sent out to sell. Many times cutouts are resealed as well. It is not quite black and white.

 

Thank goodness the UK never went in for sealing records until the 'vinyl revival'.

 

Not all of the vinyl is "perfectly mint", and the only way to see if it's unplayed is to unseal (which makes it non-refundable). Lets say it was, is it easier to have a collection of a thousand sealed mint vinyl, or to source and reseal a thousand mint vinyl, expecting them to stay sealed?

 

You can be 100% sure that Black Sabbath is a reseal. It's not defamation. It's true.

 

Can you go into more detail? What did they sell you and how do you know it was fake?

 

Since the seller knows my address I want to be vague: the shrinkwrap seems fresh, and the damage on the cover wasn't present on the shrinkwrap. I would imagine 50-60 year old shrinkwrap doesn't look new. I spend the last few months researching and concluded this wasn't a one-off accident and there is a lot of money to be made operating resealing at scale.

It has been known there were thousands of resealed mint covers floating around from Goldmine, perhaps these were resealed again with more expertise, Chee referenced this:

> Thousands of resealed albums with beaters inside were sold in the 80's at shows and Goldmine Magazine. You had dealers looking for mint covers all over the U.S. to reseal.

> Those hundreds of resealed Beatles and Stones etc will eventually come out to haunt much like the thousands of the FBI's Operation Bullpen forged Mickey Mantle etc balls and photos.

 

Yeah, I get the being vague part. So the damage on the cover not reflected in the shrinkwrap is a dead giveaway. Was the album you bought covered with stickers (e.g. KMart seems to be a favorite of this seller)?

I assume you didn't open it to check LP condition?

 

I wanted a refund so I didn't open it, but stickers were present. The seller doesn't get many refunds so don't want to be specific here.

 

No, PayPal will give you a full refund when the item is claimed to be not as described regardless of what the seller wrote in their listings. I have not heard of a buyer being completely SOL on a credit card or paypal purchase in a couple of decades now.

 

When you think about it, it's quite the scam: Sell a rare sealed album with the knowledge that very few will open the item--so there's little chance of someone figuring out that what's inside either isn't unplayed, or else doesn't match what would be expected by the cover/vintage.

 

What about all the hype stickers on those LPs? They look legit to me, but I suppose someone could be reprinting them? I think that this is a batch of new old stock. Maybe a few resealed mixed in.

 

Wait'll all those Goldmine Magazine and record show reseals start ending up on the internet sites. "Time to cash out my collection I bought 30 years ago......". The nightmare will happen.

 

Hype stickers can be taken off the beats and glued on the reseals much like price stickers. Beatle fake hypes are out there.

 

I agree they look legit, at least in the photos. That said, if there are hundreds of bucks in it for creating fake reseals, I imagine a clever, experienced person could do something like that.

 

Believe me there are experienced people doing it......they use different people to move them on eBay once they get buried in negatives.

 

How do you know?

 

The biggest roadblock to law enforcement is the inability to coordinate investigative efforts across multiple jurisdictions even if you could find one dedicated fraud investigator - that person would be unable to get anywhere with the case. Federal law enforcement could care less ….except the IRS and state taxing authority could provide an interesting avenue and profile.

The only way to really prove a case would be a search resulting in seizure of obvious instruments of the crime. But this person could legitimately have inherited a collection from daddy period or seeing how profitable it was …. could expand operations by supplementing with stolen vintage vinyl, sharpen their skills at creating fake vintage sealed and hyped albums and cash in. But until anything is proven, you must presume this person is legit.

Why not have somebody you know purchase a few more, document condition and open them and satisfy your curiosity?

 

It's always a gamble to buy a sealed LP for investment purposes. I purchased a 2 LP limited edition set in 2020, though not for investment. When I opened it a few months later, there was chip out of the edge of one LP. The individual Discogs seller wouldn't take a return, since he could no longer get credit from his supplier and I was unwilling to risk that the LP might crack into the playing surface, though this was clearly a manufacturing defect prior to packing, as there was no damage to the cover and the missing chip wasn't inside.

In addition to the risk that a sealed LP might not be a mint LP but a reseal, there is always the risk that the incorrect LP was sleeved inside by the label. Rare, but it happens.

 

I mean just think about the quality vintage vinyl collections that members here have. The theft of one of these collections would provide enough resealable material to be sold for a long time on eBay.

 

Thousands were sold through Goldmine Magazine in the past 40+ years.....I'm sure they have appeared on eBay for years or will.

 

Beatles UK LPs were never sealed, so don't get sucked in to buying one....

 

The links @vinylwhistleblower posted above are worth reading:
Galactic Ramble: DIMAGRAPHY AND THE ART OF ORGANOLEPTIC EVALUATION
FAKES AND COUNTERFEITS ON EBAY - Blog

 

Depends on where you shopped. The little local High Street shops didn't carry sealed stock-you took the record sleeve up to the counter and they pulled the record off the shelf. The big West End stores-the original Virgin Megastore and Our Price on Oxford Street-carried sealed stock. This would have been late 70's, IIRC.

 

They were in fact sealed in the 70s, sold as imports.

The imported Beatles LPs had Capitol/EMI stickers on the outside of the loose shrink. I had several titles and sold them as still sealed. The buyers loved the beautiful Parlophone pressings!!!! Surely you know those red, white, and blue stickers... since you know your vintage Beatles right!

 

True, but they sealed it themselves in the big stores. I can remember seeing piles of badly done LPs in HMV where the covers were getting bent out of shape by a poor job of sealing them.