Has it been definitively determined that these cards are being put into opened and resealed holders or, as another poster suggested, is it possible that someone has a way to simply recreate PSA's holders and just prepare fake flips to go in them? I've heard of another recent incident where the PSA 10 Ricky Henderson rookie card in the Heritage auction that just ended this past weekend was also mysteriously in the SCP auction that had ended a couple weeks earlier. The card in the SCP auction got pulled about two hours before that auction ended when someone pointed out to them that Heritage was listing the exact same card with the exact same certification number. I also heard the person who consigned the card to SCP had recently gotten it from someone in California (Surprise! Surprise!) within the last 4 - 5 months. From what I understand, neither the consigner nor the auction house could detect anything wrong or off with the PSA holder and flip so, it may not be a matter of someone figuring out how to break them open and reseal them. It very well could be that someone has taken the time and made the effort to duplicate the PSA holders. It really wouldn't be that hard to do.
I saw the Henderson rookie ended up selling for $38,240 in the Heritage auction while I heard the supposed bad/fake one in the SCP auction was in the $28K range just before it got pulled. So there is definitely enough money and incentive for these people to do this. What I'd be worried about is that these people don't use fakes cards either but, just slightly lesser grade cards to put in these fake holders/flips. My understanding is you can get a PSA 8 or 9 Henderson rookie for maybe a few hundred bucks while a PSA 10 pulls in $30-$40K. So if these people can duplicate the holders and flips, and put real cards of fairly high grades into them where the naked eye has trouble distinguishing an "8" or "9" from a "10", that is truly scary. And lord knows how many bad cards may already be circulating out there because of this.
And here's how it could get even worse. If I were doing something like this, I would probably go out and get a PSA 10 card of one of these skyrocketing rookies, and then go ahead and find the exact same card in say a PSA 8 or 8.5, maybe even a 9, depending on the cost. I'd then create a fake flip and put the lower graded card in a new holder showing it as a PSA 10, with the same cert number as the actual PSA 10 I also had. I'd then carefully crack out the real PSA 10 card and resubmit it as a fresh, new card and have PSA holster it in a brand new holder with a brand new unique cert number so that now I'd have two PSA 10's of the same card. This way you'd never have to worry about there being two PSA 10 cards out there with the exact same cert number either. Now you could do damage to the real PSA 10 card when cracking it out and destroy its value but, you'd still have the fake PSA 10 and, you wouldn't have to be successful 100% of the time you did this for it to be extremely profitable. And think about it, if the card was already graded as a PSA 10, why would someone ever bother to take it back to PSA? No one would question it.
BobC
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