I am not saying HLJ is shady. I don't have any evidence of that. But I find it really wierd that they refuse to ship a sealed master case or even guarantee that you will get 4 boxes from one case. I asked about both options and they refused. I have been half-ass tracking people's chases on here since the last few waves of regular series Kubes and there just seems to be less coming from HLJ than NCS or other vendors, at least on this site.
Officially yes, they only sell full boxes. And given the chase layout (Box 1 for the Droid, Box 4 for the Officer), someone could order 4 boxes and easily not get a chase through no intended scamming (boxes 2-4 of the first case and box 1 of the next, etc.). But we seemed to have cracked the case code, with even # cases getting one chase and odd # cases getting the other.
Has it always been this way? If so, it would be easy enough for them to open 8 boxes to see where the chase box is. I'm sure at least a few people that work there are collectors or maybe they open them for photos or whatever. The point is, once you know the layout, you can separate out the chase boxes and ship out the common ones. Maybe they keep the chases for themselves. Maybe they sell them locally on the side. Maybe they even send some through that they don't need or to show that sometimes you can get a case from HLJ. Heck, do we know that the guys selling on yahoo-japan or Ebay don't work at HLJ? What do they do with all the inserts that they refuse to include?
Like I said, I don't have any proof that they're doing any of this. Just a funny feeling about what I've seen from them over the years and the opportunity is obviously there given their odd policies. I was tempted to order from them given the price, but I will gladly go with NCS and pay a premium to ensure there is no funny business going on.