Benoit Lanteigne thought he was getting a bargain when he saw a St-Hubert store selling pre-orders for highly sought-after hockey cards at a steep discount. After spending tens of thousands of dollars, he showed up at the store the day the cards were set for release only to find the business shuttered.
Recommended Videos
Lanteigne wasn’t the only one — others say they paid for the same cards and never received them when they were released Oct. 30.
Almost two months later, five would-be clients of card dealer Maxime Brown say he has yet to show them the cards or the money — and they have little hope he ever will.
“Everyone trusted him,” Lanteigne said, adding that Brown was well known in card trading circles. Other buyers, also out thousands of dollars, agree that until recently, Brown could be counted on to come through with promised products.
“The worst part of the whole thing is that I did my due diligence,” said Marc Savoie, who also paid Brown for cards he says he never received. Though he didn’t know Brown beforehand, he said he made sure Brown had a good reputation before sending him money.
“Everybody will eventually end up reimbursed,” Brown told The Gazette. He said his bank account is frozen and that he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to pay customers the money he owes them.
Lanteigne sent The Gazette screenshots of bank records showing he sent Brown about $35,500 for hockey cards he never received. Savoie shared a receipt showing he spent $2,600.
The Gazette has seen screenshots from three others showing that, combined with Lanteigne and Savoie’s amounts, the five individuals sent Brown well over $200,000. Those five people say that they, like many others, are out thousands of dollars for undelivered hockey cards.
Many remain in contact with Brown, who ran Brown’s Cartes Sportives in St-Hubert. The Gazette has seen Facebook messages showing Brown promising refunds — but other messages contain threats.
A hobby for some, buying and selling hockey cards is serious business for others. Collectors often describe the cards as investments, which they say can yield significant returns if sold at the right time.
Most of the money sent to Brown was for boxes of SP Authentic rookie cards. Upper Deck, which dominates the hockey card market, controls the supply of the cards, limiting numbers to increase value and selling exclusively to approved merchants.
“SP Authentic is basically the cream of the crop. (They’re) the most wanted cards as a collector,” Savoie said.
Having paid about $2,600 for eight boxes of the cards, he said he had expected to sell the cards for $15,000 to $20,000 in a few years.
Boxes were especially coveted this year, Savoie said, because some will contain Chicago Blackhawks player Connor Bedard’s rookie card. Savoie said he expects those cards to surge in value over the course of Bedard’s career.
Buying a box of cards is “basically like buying a lottery ticket,” Savoie said, because collectors have no way of knowing whether a valuable card will be inside.
The Gazette spoke with five of Brown’s clients for this story. Lanteigne and Savoie agreed to be named, but the other three did not. Two clients, whose names The Gazette agreed not to reveal, are hockey card dealers themselves, and said being linked to the story might hurt their professional reputation.
One source said he worried he wouldn’t be reimbursed the tens of thousands of dollars he sent Brown should his name appear in the story. Still, he admitted that he thought any reimbursement was unlikely.
Receipts show Brown charged a range of prices for the cards. One client paid about $270 per box, while another paid close to $350 per box. But all were sure they were getting a better price than they would elsewhere — and that they would turn an easy profit once they resold the boxes.
Doubts began when buyers started to discover how many boxes of the hard-to-get cards Brown was promising to sell.
Upper Deck sells its cards to select distributors, who are required to sell them to authorized dealers. The company told The Gazette that Brown was never authorized to buy cards from Upper Deck’s distributors.
One source, also a card dealer, said he was set to receive 288 boxes — 18 cases — of the cards, which he paid almost $77,000 for between January and April. The would-be buyer said Brown told him those 18 cases were his entire supply.
But in the lead-up to the Oct. 30 release, the source said, buyers began messaging each other. He estimated that Brown was set to sell between 200 and 300 16-box cases — a number he said Brown could not possibly have had access to.
“From mid-October, I started to have doubts” about the cards, Lanteigne said. He began messaging Brown about it. “I kept bugging him,” he said.
As it became clear that the cards weren’t coming, Brown offered him “excuses, excuses, all the time,” Lanteigne said. And then there were the threats.
“I will slap your face with an elbow. I’ll make you forget everything you’ve ever learned till this day,” read messages from Brown in screenshots seen by The Gazette, continuing with threats to put someone into a coma and turn them into a “vegetable.”
The messages were sent Nov. 2 in a group chat for those seeking refunds. It’s not clear who the messages were directed at, but Lanteigne said he felt threatened by them.
In other messages, also sent Nov. 2, Brown made reference to his criminal background. “You have no idea what I’m capable of and game to do, looking at my criminal record.”
“I’m dangerous and a danger to society,” Brown wrote.
Court records show that in 2016, Brown pleaded guilty to a 2015 fraud charge and has had other convictions, including for uttering threats in 2014 and assaulting a peace officer in 2015. Most recently, he was charged for an alleged November 2023 assault; he has pleaded not guilty. Proceedings continue for that case.
For a time, Lanteigne said he felt scared. “I know he’s a criminal,” he said of Brown. Lanteigne said he deleted his address from Facebook as a precaution, but chose not to report the threats to police.
But he and Savoie did alert their local police to the missing cards. Lanteigne filed a complaint with provincial police in Dunham and Savoie with the RCMP’s Shediac, N.B., detachment.
Brown blamed the situation on clients he said were already accusing him of not having the boxes weeks ahead of the Oct. 30 release date.
He disputed their claim that he was selling more boxes than were possible to obtain. “They don’t know how it works,” he said. He denied telling a client they would be the only one to receive boxes.
Brown said he had sellers lined up, but they fell through at the last moment.
On Oct. 30, when the cards didn’t come through, he said clients’ complaints to their banks led to his account being frozen.
“I’ve refunded everything that I’m able to refund,” he said. Brown said that he was earning money working and had sold cards to start paying back clients.
He said he’d been “very angry” over a photo of his child sent in another Facebook chat when he sent the threatening messages. Those messages “never targeted anyone,” Brown said.
Recent months have been tough, he said. “I lost my reputation. I lost all my money.”
Savoie, Lanteigne and two others who spoke to The Gazette paid for their cards by e-transfer, while the other source said he paid through a combination of cash and e-transfer. Since they didn’t pay by credit card, none are eligible to get money back through fraud protection.
Savoie took on debt to buy the hockey cards, borrowing from his line of credit. He said he justified it because the gains he expected to make by reselling the boxes were well above the $2,600 he paid.
“My investment is gone,” he said.
Savoie said he’ll pay off his debt by selling other cards from his collection.