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WATA Turnaround Times?


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33 minutes ago, mlbfan10 said:

I had my first order from late February pop today, got the deep badge email and both games are 9.0 or higher graded but when I check my grades/grade details, it's empty. Is there a delay in getting grades after getting the deep badge email?

Yes, your items can be in the post grading phase for months. They do not become available until the games ship back.

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On 9/15/2021 at 2:13 PM, AdamW said:

Here's a fun game you can play while you wait for your WATA returns:

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credit to unicornformaggi from Greg's discord, we had the idea at the same time but their card looks better than mine!

Omg, how did I not see this before. Lmao, bringing it back up in case anyone missed it like me 🤣

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On 5/5/2021 at 3:00 PM, tbone3969 said:

So it does exist.  Just really rare.  I wonder if there is any game that truly does not have a single sealed copy in existence.  Is that even possible?

I'm super late but wanted to answer this. There are confirmed sealed copies of Flintstones: Surprise At Dinosaur Peak, Little Samson and Stadium Events so nothing really on NES except maybe Mah-Jong. Even if something is very hard to find sealed, sometimes someone can find an entire pallet of them in a warehouse like they did with Caltron 6-In-1. Going forward I think it would be near impossible to find any game without a sealed copy if it was available at retail at some point because most platforms had minimum print runs or simply sold well enough for them to still exist.

Going backwards from NES you'll find it to be very common because systems like the Atari 2600 had no restrictions on whom could make games for it. There were literally people in their basement hand-assembling cartridges and selling them by mail order from magazines. This is presumed to be the case for Birthday Mania, Red Sea Crossing and Music Machine, possibly Gamma Attack as well. Not only are there no sealed copies of these games but there aren't even any known boxes and nobody even knows if there ever were boxes.

Air Raid is also unknown to ever have been available at retail, many people think the only known copies are salesman samples even though that one was found with a Tuesday Morning store sticker on it, the store owner could have received a sample copy and then thrown it in the bin to sell when he decided not to order any more.

This should be its own topic I think, it's quite interesting when you get into some of the older games.

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Another mail from Wata with more blah blah blah

Hi Mijael,

Thank you for contacting Wata Games. Your order is still in post-grading being checked, labeled, encapsulated, and prepped for shipping. We're sorry for the long delays that you are experiencing. We realize that all areas of our operation are running behind and we're doing everything we can to catch up. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

I want to explain the causes of the delay. There are several contributing factors- order volume, a concerted effort to clear the backlog of existing orders from the surge during Covid, supply shortages and shipping delays caused by port backups. Most recently, these delays at seaports have caused us to run out of some parts needed for encapsulation.

We completely understand the frustration and wanting your submissions back as soon as possible. I assure you that all submissions are safely stored, and we will be shipping your order as quickly as possible. While we do everything we can to resolve each of these issues we are processing as many orders as we are able in the order they were received. We are processing orders by tier, because of the cost of the priority service purchased, but all of our tiers are currently behind the estimates. We are informing customers as often and as accurately as we can, but we aren't always able to give accurate ETAs since so much of this is outside of our control. To keep shipping running smoothly, we are unable to expedite orders or move anyone's place in line. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the delay.

Again, I'm very sorry for the wait, but I hope this information provides some clarity and assurance.

Take care,

The Wata Team

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3 hours ago, scooby said:

Can somebody explain to me how Heritage is selling WATA graded DS games?

They opened a window to submit DS games for a short time (once, maybe more idk) I got a few in last fall, one of the ones on HA was mine. I was told they were testing grading those systems.

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On 10/27/2021 at 9:59 AM, RETRO said:

Do you mean VGA? This whole thread is about WATA lying about its wait times and charging people for services it has no intention to provide or ability to provide. VGA has a delay but it doesn't seem like it was the focus here.

you're being a bit dramatic here. wata definitely provides a real service; they ship a very real product. it's just delayed by months and months unless you pay $200 per game to have it in a "reasonable" time frame (warp zone tier).

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I'm a lawyer. I used to represent corporate entities charged with felony criminal fraud for charging for a service in an amount greater than $50 that they knew in advance they could not complete. Some of the people I represented went to prison because they had done this more than *one* time. WATA knows its wait-times, and has not changed its website—meaning that it is collecting literally tens of thousands of dollars in payments, from *hundreds* of people, for an advertised service it has advance knowledge it can't offer. People paying money for 15- and 45-day turnarounds on the basis of representations made by WATA are getting their services completed in 3x or 4x that time not by chance or bad luck, but under circumstances WATA is aware of in advance. In my jurisdiction this is variously charged—I mean real people getting put into real custody—as Fraud or Theft By Deception (both at felony levels, with a punishment of 3.5-7 years in prison or 7.5-15 years in prison if the amount taken from a single victim is $1,000 or more). Additional evidence prosecutors would use in this case involves WATA's promised grading scale being routinely ignored and its products repeatedly being defective due to human hairs, dog hairs, scuff marks, unsightly bubbling, and other indications of negligence that confirm that it cannot professionally do the work it represents it can do and is paid to do. This latter evidence is probative but of course not itself criminal; it's merely evidence of intent and state of mind for other conduct—the misrepresentations on the website—that are likely criminal.

WATA has full control over its website and could change it at any time. I have literally—literally, friend—seen men handcuffed right in front of me to be taken off to prison for less than what WATA is doing. Men I liked. So please don't tell me I'm being dramatic. You don't understand how criminal fraud works, and frankly if sealed-and-graded resellers weren't making so much money once they *do* get their games back at least one would have called the police already.

I'm being melodramatically kind to WATA—in a massive under-reaction—by only criticizing them rather than publishing a legal analysis of what they're doing to an audience of millions on social media and PROOF. If I could speak to them now, I'd say, (a) you're welcome, (b) change your goddamned website before someone calls the Colorado Attorney General's office (or I guess, now, the California Attorney General's office). Of course, they're engaged in interstate commerce and are committing fraud as a premeditated course or scheme, so it would probably be a federal rather than state case. Keep in mind that people who give WATA thousands thinking they will receive a service in 45 days that they don't receive for over a year are not only losing the benefit of the money they handed over but (i) facing the chance their items will depreciate massively in value over that year, and (ii) even if they didn't lose money have been intentionally lied to by a corporate actor in order to separate them from their money. That is, however it makes you feel inside, a crime. If WATA didn't lie to consumers on its website—especially first-time customers who don't know better—those customers would go elsewhere, to one of the seven other grading houses that could do the work. WATA knows this, which is why its lies are intentional. How long is it before someone from P1 or IGS or RGS or RAS or CGC tries to reports WATA to law enforcement? It'd be a slimy move, but this is a slimy business.

And Karl Jobst is right that some of WATA's other conduct may be considered commercial fraud at the institutional level—he's provided some of the relevant statutes on YouTube—so I'm sure those allegations would accompany any complaint to law enforcement. WATA is skating on unbearably thin ice and the only reason they're getting away with it is that their victims are more motivated by money than justice.

S.

Edited by RETRO
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PS: I'll give you a specific example—a case I tried that was front-page news in the small city I practiced in back in the 2000s. A one-armed roofer who was a military veteran took more than $500 from a lady in a contract for a roofing job that he said he would complete in "X" amount of time. During that "X" period, he took a few steps toward completing the work, like buying a few materials and dropping some of those materials off at the work site. When the work wasn't done by 3X, the complainant called the police. The defendant said, "I plan on finishing the work!" (I paraphrase) and indeed he had a history of finishing jobs. He was nevertheless arrested for a Class A Felony (maximum punishment: 7.5 to 15 years in state prison). One of the big-ticket pieces of evidence was him not having had any meaningful contact with the alleged victim during the "X" period (though there was a little) and evidence that allegedly showed he knew in advance he would not be able to finish the work in the amount of time he had gotten the alleged victim's money by saying he could do the work in.

So tell me, how does that differ from what WATA is doing hundreds of times a month? It seems to me that the only difference is that my client was an independent contractor from the working class represented by a public defender, and WATA is owned by PSA and its victims are making silly money off suckers in the sealed-and-graded retro video game market.

In other words, the only difference is the wealth of the defendant and the current state of the market (woe to WATA if it changes and they're no longer making men rich!).

So yes, I get pretty dramatic about stuff like this, because I've looked in the eyes of the poor men—in all senses of the word "poor"—who get the ass end of this gaping hole in America's criminal justice system.

All that said, if WATA goes down it won't be because of me. Life is too short and I value my time too much to spend it tussling with WATA in that way. I'm just making the point that people are under-reacting to what WATA is doing, and for reasons that have to do with money rather than principle, IMO.

Edited by RETRO
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@RETROif you get a Class action together, hit me up. I mean, I'm small potatoes but I submitted my one game (for a grand total of about $68) that was received December 2, last year. Estimated time was 6 months and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see it til 2022, and even 2023 wouldn't surprise me at this rate.

I also admit my submission was just an experiment and my game was shelf candy, but still, I'm quite agitated. I know others have it far worse but I'll be one of the few to add his few bucks of value to the pile of complaints.

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6 minutes ago, RH said:

@RETROif you get a Class action together, hit me up. I mean, I'm small potatoes but I submitted my one game (for a grand total of about $68) that was received December 2, last year. Estimated time was 6 months and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see it til 2022, and even 2023 wouldn't surprise me at this rate.

I also admit my submission was just an experiment and my game was shelf candy, but still, I'm quite agitated. I know others have it far worse but I'll be one of the few to add his few bucks of value to the pile of complaints.

Right now the market is so hot, and WATA so clearly the "it" grading house, that no one wants to mess with them. When CGC opens up, and if/when a fourth house takes off even a little, and if/when the market cools a bit, I expect someone will try to take legal action against WATA. Again, I'm not offering them my legal advice, but I think any lawyer advising them would probably have told them to either (a) put a temporary pause on all new business—at every tier—or (b) change the WATA website immediately to reflect what it can actually do. If you lose some business, so be it. At least the feds don't shut you down permanently. VGA is also way behind its stated commercial promises and inducements, but it didn't commit commercial fraud via Pawn Stars and conflicts of interest and other stuff, so it's less vulnerable right now.

Re: a class action, see my second note, above. If this happens, it won't be because of me. I cover WATA as an investigative journalist and longtime consumer advocate at RETRO but I have no interest in litigating this issue myself. It's just not worth my time under the circumstances; I'm not a WATA customer except for a single "test" cleaning of an item as a journalist (I'll be reporting back on what happens).

Edited by RETRO
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