"Toy Scalpers Buy Scarce Items, Then Resell Them at a Profit"
Here's a classic and very nostalgic article from 1996 from The Wall Street Journal of all places, about a scalper from the 1990s & his adventures with Trek figures, including Tapestry Picard.
I remember when this article first ran & I was pretty amazed by the scope of just one person's work and the amount of cash that it generated. (Also, it tended to explain why I was not seeing The Good Stuff on shelves).
Also, this is a pretty cool window into the action figure craze of the late 1990s, one that was somewhat moderated by eBay starting in the early 2000s. On one hand scalpers received a worldwide selling platform, but on the other hand action figure bubble deflated quite a bit.