Many of you are now familiar with the Whatnot platform as it’s been around for some time. Over the past year Whatnot has picked up a lot of new sellers and customers. While I can only speak for the Sports Card side of things, I wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts and experiences so that it may help other Whatnoters.
From a buyer prospective I’ve been ripped off several times on Whatnot. The most recent ones were from “Pull Box” or “Wheel Spin” rewards. On the pull box purchase it was also combined with a wheel spin. The streamer stated there were 3 chase cards that could only be won by landing on them during the wheel spin. The wheel consisted of around 150 options making landing on a chaser rare.
Other options on the wheel were how many times you could get cards from the pull box, like x2 or x3 up to x6. It was my turn and believe it or not the wheel landed on a chaser card. The streamer just say there in disbelief and finally mumbled that I won the chaser. Each of the chasers were on the wheel and I had landed on a Black Ice /10 Bowman prospect.
Next he asked me to pick a number from 1 to 3. I was confused and asked why. At that moment he had decided to scam me. He stated it was for a hit draft to win one of the chasers. This was not the original way the game was played and he only changed it because he didn’t think someone would land on a chaser so early in the game.
He concluded that after the stream ended he would stream again the next day to let others finish hitting the chasers so the draft could begin. I knew this was a lie. The next day he ran a football stream with the same setup and same rules. Land on the card and win it. When I questioned him he stated he wasn’t going to be baseball anymore and told me to ask for a refund.
This is wrong on so many levels. What’s even more sad is the stream had a 5 star rating and sold thousands of items. Had he been getting by with no one hitting a chaser all this time? Only selling what was in the pull box which was base cards only and some not even of known players.
At the time of my winning the card it was selling for a couple hundred dollars. By the time whatnot got around to actually responding in a human sense the card had plummeted due to a bad season. They offered me $7 to make it right.
What would have made it right was to punish the seller by making them send the card or banning them for false advertisement and scamming.
Moving on….
Next scammer was selling Mystery Bags. The floor was $50 and the cost was also $50. The ceiling was several hundred dollars. This is a good concept if you’re looking to move cards with a certain value. This way you get the current cost of the cards on the market and the buyer gets the value for their money. However not all the cards were $50 or more. The card I won was a PSA 9 Nolan Syndergaard base card valued at $0. A PSA 10 had sold for $5.
When they opened it they were confused and played it off like it was a $$$ dollar card. They kept screaming OMG HOW did that get in there!!!! I messaged them and informed them the card had no value. They messaged me and said they would make it right by sending me a $50 valued card but that mail never came. I messaged them several other times with no response.
The moral of these stories are you can’t always trust ratings or sales. Do your homework before jumping in head first. Ask yourself, “are they really selling value or just trying to unload low value cards with a twist”.
It’s one thing to run dollar auctions on Whatnot for cards that range $1 to $10 or so for Bowman Firsts, Numbered or Rising Rookies but not for $0.05 cards.
Stay vigilant!