I am glad to hear that others have had had positive customer experiences with PSA. I can only tell you that I did not. They did step up when I challenged what they were going to give me for reimbursement. I am not going to go into details of the negotiations there, but what they offered initially was what they claimed to be "fair market value" and it simply wasn't fair market value. We came to an agreement that I am comfortable with and that is the one positive outcome.
The reason I wanted to share this story mostly - and a few of you hit right on it - was the fact that a card that was so clearly damaged was released back into the wild with the exact same grade as it had before the damage occurred. That tells me that there is no final QC happening and that it just makes me question the system they have in place, as well as the grades of other cards that are out there. I know when I was first getting started back in collecting, I relied a lot on the grade of the card as my eye wasn't trained for the "card not the flip" aspect. But if PSA grades inherently carry a value, this is just another illustration of how that value is potentially deeply flawed. And I have nothing to gain sharing this - 99% of my collection is in PSA slabs and I want them to have a bulletproof reputation. While I am small potatoes as a collector, I've invested what to me is quite a bit of money in what I was hoping were cards that were effectively bonded, if you will, by PSA's reputation.
And yes, the nature of the damage is so baffling to me - I can not understand for the life of me how they mangled the surface like that. I suspect it had something to do with the slabbing process. That's why I asked a few times what might have happened, but got no response. Anyway - just wish I had my card back the way it was.
