Having been an Internal Auditor for a major university for many years, I found that "If there is a way, someone will find it." I found that "Inside trading happens all of the time. Although I found out about "inside trading/purchasing" that "If there is a will, they will find a way."
Is it worth it for someone to sell their should if the money was right? Not for me. But like was said, this was probably, if true, an insider thing and where their possibly might have been a finders fee involved. But not ethical.
Eh, some were, but what Mike said is accurate, graders were always prohibited from dealing coins, but other staff members were not. As for whether it's still going on today or not, I don't know. What I do know is other staff members were most definitely selling coins from day 1, and still selling coins as recently as Sept. 2018 - which is when David Hall was fired. David Hall always was and still is a major dealer. As for the subject of this thread, I have no idea if the rumors are true. But it sure wouldn't surprise me if they were for there are and always have been large numbers of high dollar coins privately sold. It could even be argued the vast majority of them are sold that way.
I understand the conflict in interest, but who else will have the expertise for grading coins? It wouldn't surprise me if many, or even most, of their graders were dealers at one point or another. I'm not sure about PCGS but it seems NGC had manpower shortages over the last couple years. I would bet that other TPGs did too. I don't know of a BA in coin grading. These people have to come from somewhere, and your average collector probably doesn't have enough general expertise to cover. Yes it's bad, but it might be something that TPGs are willing to overlook with current turnaround times still fairly long.
Nor should some random post with 0 proof be treated as such for some sort of accusation like that. Actively contacting a submitter trying to work out a deal for monetary gain is a big accusation.
Didn't Martha go to jail for this very thing (insider trading)? Oh right. I nearly forgot.......this ain't the stock market and what we all preach here is that coins ain't an investment venue........
We haven't heard from Mr. Wood in quite sometime. He used to brighten up this site. With all the trouble and fuss in the world today we need Ed Wood. Maybe I'll reinvent myself as Joe Steel.
Do you have any more info on this, i.e., did you hear it from a credible source or published on a legit site? Or did you just post this as a baseless rumor in order to throw smack at a TPG to stir up some discord? I'm not a big TPG fan and if they do unethical or questionable things, they should be called out, but when you make these kinds of accusations, even by saying they're rumors, you better have something to back it up. After all, would you like people saying "I heard a rumor that Dennis had his Cheerios dollars graded by IGC because [insert your cutting rumor here]. Should that be posted? Of course not. Then why post your baseless (you haven't backed it up yet) rumor?