PSA Mishap

[Jess]

"Hello, would you accept to go through www.escrow.com?

Well, you might have trouble with French sellers, "escroc" (pronounced the same way as "escrow") being the French for "swindler" ;D

"Hi, would you accept paiement through www.swindler.com?"  [smiley=evil.gif]

[Erl00]

Yes, escrow is a funny sounding word  :D


This seller is more and more puzzling. His APs have fake sigs and now his PSA graded cards are suspicious ...

[hammr7]

While this card might be a fraud, I have no doubt that such a mistake is possible with PSA.  The idea of PSA is that a buyer can be a total idiot and still know what he or she is getting.  I do not like PSA, because in my personal experience I have encountered both misgraded cards and mis-identified cards.  

When PSA went into grading Magic cards, they were clueless about the specifics.  This means they had to find, or more likely assign to someone, the task of being an "expert" on MTG cards.   Anyone on this forum knows that such expertise is not easily attained.  So PSA either got a Magic collector or dealer who was a bit sloppy when it comes to details, or got some baseball card grader and had him bone up on magic in his spare time.   They might have even gone to one of their Sportscard dealers who claimed expertise in MTG.

Obviously, (at least based on my personal experience), PSA  doesn't have sufficient QC checks.  So if a"grading expert" screws up, he is probably the last one to see the graded card before it is shipped out.  And PSA has a habbit of trying to hide their mistakes, as this might undermine the confidence they attempt to inspire in collectors.

So maybe this card is a fraud by the seller.  If so, a quick inspection of the case should tell the story (so long as the buyer knows what the tell-tale signs of a real PSA case are, and what the signs of such a case being tampered are).  But it could just be another of those ugly anomalies that PSA tries to hide.

[Alifromcairo2]

Attention, this salesman already sold cards with doubtful signatures...  Then PSA in causes, I do not know!  ;)

[pickle.69]

How about thisone

Unlimited lotus with Alpha Back

HAHA
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 81157&rd=1

[l0qii]

I would really like to know if there is anything we can do about this. He has been sold at least 4 PSA 9 lotuses. I wonder if he is getting fakes graded?

[hammr7]

I am not a fan of PSA (see rant above).  But if this guy is getting fakes graded, then it would almost need to be a conspiracy with the PSA grader.  If fakes got through easily it would mean that PSA is totaly incompetant when trying to evaluate a real magic card.  And the only real claim to fame PSA has is its ability to determine if a card is real or fake (you can always look at the card to determine it's condition).

There are two more likely scenarios.

1.  The seller has real cards in decent condition, and is getting the benefit of the doubt from PSA on grade.  This has been known to happen.

2.  The supplier of these PSA graded cards (maybe someone the seller knows) may have become good at cracking the PSA cases, and is replacing the "real" cards.  There have been a few sportscard frauds where the perpetrator figured out how to crack and reseal the PSA cases.  There are telltale signs, which hard-core sportscard collectors often look for.  But most Magic PSA card buyers don't look too closely, since they put their faith in PSA.  If this is what is happening, then the original owner can keep resending one great card in to be graded, each time getting a new PSA case with a different number.

And there seems to be an explosion in high-quality "proxies" these days.  Most can be easily uncovered by running the traditional tests on them.  If a card is slabbed, it is much more difficult to make a reasonable evaluation of authenticity.  And if the card is PSA graded, many owners would never think to doubt the cards authenticity.

[l0qii]

I would rule out #2 since 2 of the Lotus numbers are consecutive and a third is only 3 away for the other two. This would imply they were all sent together.

Cracking cases is not as easy as it sounds, but is possible and has been known to happen. But rather than getting the same card graded several times I would suspect they buy cheap PSA card, like sports commons that range around $10, cracking them, printing a new label and sealing in fake. The numbers do check out as authentic though.

All this seems as unlikely as actually owning 4 legit psa 9/10 lotuses. So really the only thing against this guy is that he has a bunch of fake sigs and doesn't seem to mind passing them off as real.

[flaminio]

I'm late to this discussion, but the coin branch of CU (PCGS) mislabels coins *all the time*. Indeed, there's even a group of collectors who collect "error slabs". Putting a Walk in an Ancestral Recall holder is not that egregious -- hey, at least they're both blue!

In any case, if the owner of the card wanted to, PSA would reholder the card for free. It's not that big of a deal.

As for the UN Lotus with the Alpha back, this sort of thing happens all the time with coin auctions as well -- except it's much funnier to see a half dollar front linked to a nickel back or the like.

Bottom line -- goofs happen, and it's not always a scam.