Comic-Con Hustlers: Exposing the Dark Side of Exclusive Collectors at SDCC

By The Daily SuperHero on Thursday, July 25th, 2013

Comic-Con International is only for four and a half days, including Preview Night, and those who have been to SDCC will tell you that is still not enough time to explore all the things that are available for attendees to see and do. One of the things known by some, but not all, is a shady dark side of Comic-Con. Specifically, a Comic-Con scam many take part of.

Every year, more and more exclusives are made available only to those who attend the convention and that means more and more dealers and resellers have an opportunity to buy them up before the majority of regular attendee has a chance to even buy one. All of this to make a ton of profit. It’s hard to blame these folks for trying to make some cash, as long as they play by the rules and limitations set by companies, but many of them do not play by the rules. So you have to feel bad for those SDCC fans who just want one of the exclusives and cannot get them because they are bought out so quickly by the rule breakers and hustlers.

This year has been no exception (see the insane photo found via a Google search). Whoever this person is that landed all the exclusives in the photo will easily make a bunch of cash-money but at the expense of other fans who just want one for their collection or their kid(s).

Bottom line is that there’s a ton of money to be made if you can land some of SDCC’s exclusives. But when attendees exceed the allotment, per companies like Hasbro and Mattel, it is just plain shady. (And shitty.)

So this is how the SDCC limits work. This year, Mattel limited every person to six of each item per day. This is absolutely crazy and just promotes the hustlers to get in line everyday and buy the maximum amount. Mattel needs to change their policy on this to be able to let more attendees even have a chance to purchase at least one of their exclusives, for sure.

Hasbro used to have a similar issue when it came to limitations, but this year they pretty much set a maximum of two items per person for all their items. But Hasbro still has a loophole in their SDCC purchasing policy. They have it applied per badge. To clarify, if you have a 4-day pass, Hasbro will stamp and mark the back of your badge and you cannot buy any more because you wear the 4-day badge during the entire convention. However, if you bought badges for each day of SDCC you will have a new badge to wear for each day and that will allow you to buy the maximum amount from Hasbro everyday of Comic-Con because the back of your badge hasn’t been stamped and marked for the new day.

This still doesn’t explain how that person, who took the photo of that ridiculous amount of SDCC exclusives, managed to get all those since it is visually obvious Hasbro’s limitations were well exceeded. If you look closely you can see 16 of the Marvel Legends Thunderbolts sets. And even if you do the math of two per day, per new badge it doesn’t add up. In other words, there were either several people hustling together to acquire such a large exclusives collection or something very, very shady was going down.

“All I wanted was that Star Wars Boba Fett Hasbro exclusives for my personal collection and I couldn’t get it because it was already sold out for the entire convention on Friday,” one SDCC attendee told The Daily SuperHero. “I blame Hasbro for not preventing the dealers who are buying these things everyday, somehow, because I see people with boxes of stuff and bags full of multiples all around the convention. This saddens me since all I want is one… just one.”

Sadly, it is what it is and attendees who want to make mass amounts of profits off of Comic-Con will always find the loopholes in buying as many exclusives as their bank account allows because that’s what hustlers do. Those who have to pay the premium prices for the exclusives they wanted and couldn’t get because of the resellers still hope Mattel and Hasbro make further adjustments to their SDCC buying policies to continue to try and prevent those who buy massive amounts of collectibles.