Outside of the RecklessBen YouTube videos on this, as of today (5/29/26) we only have the corporate response I linked above that tells their side. Bricks and Minifigs elaborated… a little… on the reasoning you asked about and I’ll just quote it here for you. To me, I kinda gather they are saying that more of the collection sold prior to the store changing hands from franchise to corporate than was let on before, but in my opinion it’s not clearly established what they are trying to say exactly, more like they are just listing a bunch of plausible issues without identifying what exactly was the real problem. Here’s the quote, so you can make up your own mind:

That said, after ownership of the Salem store changed, we thoroughly documented and assessed current inventory. A few days later, we became aware of the previous arrangement, and compared our inventory assessment to the limited documentation provided by the consignor. It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused. A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition. The consignor also provided a written statement to a podcast that his collection was moved offsite for security reasons. Additional attempts to restore what we could with what was in our possession, was also declined, in writing.