Are they? They passed off all these cards and will likely get away with it. The people left holding these cards are the ones who got 'screwed'. Though collecting, and paying high premiums, for pieces of cardboard backed by barely anything at all probably means they were screwing themselves to begin with. (IE A game of pokemon with 100% proxies is just as fun as a game of pokemon with no proxies)
I guess when I called them idiots the context in my mind was "how could they think they could get away with it using digital printing".
They've committed fraud, plain and simple. As a consequence now all things like this may get closer scrutiny and fakes like these will be binned.
For some reason I'm reminded of the fake wine guy... taking advantage of the fact that valuable wines are kept as investments, so he faked them... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
The first seller of record can simply say 'A customer brought these in, I bought them after getting them cgc rated. The rating agency signed off on them so I had no idea that they could be forgeries' .. repeat back for their seller ad infinitum.
