The high-stakes action of buying and selling Yeezys in the secondary market has seen its share of fraudulent sales and fake shoes. To keep price statistics accurate, StockX — which tracks buying and selling activity on the resale market — removes these sales from its data.
“To find out what the true market value of a shoe is, you have to get rid of things that throw off the values,” CEO Josh Luber said.
Luber said removing these sales from StockX data is imperative to its success. To determine what may be bogus, StockX sets a floor and ceiling based on low, average and high sale prices, and removes sales that fall well outside of those parameters.
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“If someone’s selling Yeezys for $300 today, there’s no way that’s a legit sale,” he said. “It’s either a fake or some other issue with it, and statistically it’s OK to remove that, since the odds of it being a real shoe are so low that we’re OK with eliminating that.”
Sneakerhead Dallas Penn believes fraudulent sales are rampant, and legitimate sellers reap the benefits of the actions of fake ones.
“If you’re sitting on 10 pairs of 750s, you want people to think they’re selling for more because you want more money,” he said. “You want to hear someone bought a pair for $10,000.”
Although Yeezys aren’t the only shoes on the market with exaggerated prices from these sales, Luber said fraudulent sales occur far less often with Jordan and Nike releases.
