I don't know how important the registry thing is to you. If the cards mean more than the registry to you as a collector, If it were me, based on what I did years ago when I got spooked, I might think about moving some of the more expensive pieces and going instead for a nice midgrade that you've vetted thoroughly. I would add that if your main concern is the cards losing value, as opposed to just hating the idea of having an altered card, I don't think you need to worry. Enough people don't care that it won't affect resale value.

You might consider selling your high grade cards and moving into lower grade, but great looking, cards? For me, it's fun to find really nice looking lower grade gems.
Collecting can still be fun but you need to decide what's best for you. One suggestion, take your time and sleep on it for a while (weeks or a few months). Many times the answer becomes clear after mulling it over for a while.

Thanks for the advice, thoughts, and ideas. I appreciate your willingness to engage, even if it's tempting to laugh at my pain, because I had it coming for being a gullible rube.

And I'm definitely not going to move quickly. No sense in making a big decision based on one terrible event.

I think many of us have been there, and no it's not funny.

Most of us have felt that pain before. Like when I gave the NYPL my Peck and Snyder......it made me sick over the whole issue. And some members (at the time LOL) thought I did something nefarious (which I didn't). Hang in there, you'll figure it out.
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Nicolo, good luck on your journey. Ultimately, it is your decision to make.

While I haven't had any of my collection outed, I am worried about it happening someday. I will continue to make the best decision I can on future card purchases.

That an action is done is not evidence that action is necessary. Though I am happy to learn PSA is now using a post it note system to explain why cards got certain grades. I didn’t know that. Explaining why they do what they do is good.

We’ve gone from “misinformation” to “a different explanation”. Looking at the slabs, and of numerous other 50’s Topps cards, print variants from which sheet slot the card was in do not seem to disqualify high grades. This seems the more reasonable evidence for me to use, the evidence of what PSA has actually done, rather than to assume that any action done is a necessary action done and skipping the other work performed by Moser’s *finger and moisture*. Misinformation is factually false and inaccurate information usually with intent to deceive, not an opinion from the physical evidence that one just disagrees with or does not like.

I will certainly admit that Moser has infinitely more experience submitting to PSA. As a collector of cardboard instead of a criminal fraudster, I don’t have as much need for their services ;)

I would argue that your card hasn't actually lost any value. Perhaps it has lost value in your eyes, or in the eyes of a very small minority of collectors, but the card's true value is dictated by what the market thinks it's worth, not you. And the market has clearly shrugged at the trimming and alteration scandals, as did the FBI.

If you sell this at auction to someone else and tether a disclosure to it, you may appease your moral compass, but from an economics perspective, all you've done is given someone else the opportunity for arbitrage, because it is an absolute certainty that someone (and likely the very next owner) will just resell it without disclosure. In fact, the disclosure itself nearly ensures that the next owner would be someone looking to profit from the opportunity because they would simply just outbid anyone who was afraid or put off by the disclosure. The card, and it's value, will persist unless it is destroyed. And if the card were sent to PSA, they would likely not honor their grade guarantee. They would say, "nope, looks good!" just like they always go.

At the end of the day, selling with a disclosure attached accomplishes nothing. If you truly want to do the "right thing", then you need to either destroy the card, or crack it out and send it back to PSA raw with a note attached that says, "this card was recolored" and then eat the loss. But this model is unsustainable. The vast majority of high grade vintage cards have been tampered with in some way. You'd be removing a single grain of sand from the beach.

Coming to terms with the fact that the entire high grade vintage market (and even a sizeable percentage of both the lower grade vintage and the modern market) has been f*d with is something that we either just accept or we live in denial about, or are simply ignorant of altogether. How we reach proceed with that knowledge is up to us individually. It has certainly helped to shap my purchasing decisions. I almost never buy a key vintage card graded above a 6, and I look for eye appeal. Yet I still end up with altered cards regularly. If I like the card regardless, I keep it. If I don't, I just resell it. And I don't attach my opinions to the listing. If I think it's altered, I don't care. Because if I did, I might as well give up on this hobby because the number of altered cards out there is endless. I'm not going to take a loss after loss into perpetuity to ease my conscience and effectively just give someone else free money.

To quote the song from the Mikado, "Here's a pretty state of things, a pretty state of things." Man, how did we get to this point? I wonder if David Hall knew from day one his company would result in more doctoring, not less.

I dislike this attitude more than any other.

Just because a bunch of other people are clueless or corrupt does not make it ok.

Frankly, it's also a huge temptation that I manage to avoid.

agreed!

Bingo snow it has not lost any value and please do not lose any sleep Raulis.

If it makes anybody feel better I am the moron of the year ,
Thinking .. “ hooray “ card with a rough cut got a nice grade 🙄

I personally believe that if this card were to be resold with disclosure...it would lose significant value. And the opinion/mindset that it doesn't matter...is quite detrimental to the hobby.

To each their own, right! If I were a newbee attempting to enter this hobby...with full disclosure of all the corruption/skechiness abound...I'd pick another hobby!

Pete. I agree with what you say.
But instead of telling them to pick another hobby, I would try to steer them in a different direction.

This card is 113 yrs old. None of us will look this good at 113. Nuff Ced! (from the BST yrs ago)
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Thankfully my budget has me hunting low grade gems, generally can't afford anything vintage above a 1-2. I do find this thread fascinating. Some of those doctoring jobs I have to admit are pretty astonishing to me, seems to me there's some real skill involved there. It's the dishonesty that's the problem here, but for a psa bump from 5 to 9 meaning a $29,950 profit, it's no surprise this is happening.

All that said, it's interesting to me that the grading companies haven't starting offering something like "restored" as a qualifier to take some of the stigma off of "altered". I can see someone not from this world looking at this process as more like art restoration which is a rather common and accepted thing for really old and valuable artwork.

good point, Leon...I'd steer them away from collecting high grade slabs.

It's acceptable for art because each work is unique and over time the appearance can deteriorate meaning less enjoyment for people viewing it. No such rationale for 99 percent of the garbage being done to cards which is solely for deception and profit. Please don't elevate these scum to the level of art restorers.

Make no mistake I am not complimenting PSA. I had to pay for the review. Now they just take your money and no post it note.

If you reread my post it said I had not ever seen a Mays higher than a 7 with the print flaw. Had I looked, as you did, I would have found them.

In that same post I was replying to both what you wrote as well as what snowman had written and this thread had misinformation. I never said that either of you had an intent to deceive. YIKES. Bit of a stretch there. Not everything should be this combative. Relax.

Got it. So a card graded "A" is the same value as a PSA 8.5

And what was the point of third party grading again? :confused:

I agree if it's done for dishonest means it's completely unacceptable, and what I'm seeing highlighted in this thread is truly flat out fraud that should be illegal. I'm not trying to elevate fraud. But to say only unique items are acceptable for restoration seems pretty close minded. What about old cars? Or old watches? I have no problem imaging that there could be a legitimate market for restored old baseball cards, and there seems to me to be some real skill involved. The trick is the buyer has to know what they're buying. Sadly that's not what's happening in the card market.

Sure, if it's fully disclosed and there is a way to ensure subsequent buyers can't be deceived.

Comment removed.

I don't see this as a subjective take or as an opinion with which we can agree or disagree on. I am merely pointing out the objective reality that surrounds us. It is true that this card maintains its value on the marketplace regardless of whether we want it to or not. The only opinion that matters is the one on the slab. That is true for altered cards as well as for unaltered cards that get erroneously rejected. You can't sell that 33 Goudey Gehrig AA for the price of a PSA 6 even if PSA got it wrong.

It depends on the level of granularity you're looking at though. Sure, he could disclose that it has been recolored and that PSA missed it, and that would certainly deter some bidders. But it won't deter the flippers who are there to profit from it. And whatever downward pricing effect it has on that single transaction is merely temporary. It has no staying power on the actual value of the card. And the act of disclosing for a single transaction has no effect on the market value of the cards itself. You are simply paying someone else a percentage of its value so you can sleep better at night. But if you thought about it more deeply, you'd realize that you haven't actually solved the problem. You're still just kicking the can down the road. That card WILL end up with another buyer who pays full price for it and who finds themselves in the same predicament as you. And at the end of the day all you did was put a few hundred bucks into some flipper's pocket.

You can place a value on a disclosure. Sure, no problem. Sell it without one, then sell it with one and calculate the delta. But whatever that value difference is, it would be dwarfed when compared to the value delta between what it sold for with disclosure and what it sold for after cracking it out and having it reslabbed as "Authentic Altered". If you want to actually do the "right thing", then you have to crack it out and put it in an AA slab before you sell it. And you'd better be prepared to repeat the process for the majority of the cards in your collection. Hats off to anyone who is ready for that level of commitment to the hobby and to their moral compass. Because anything shy of that is just a self imposed tax one pays to help them sleep better at night.

I honestly have no idea, but if raulus were to reach out to PSA with the before & after scans would he be laughed out of the building? Would there be any response from PSA? Seems to me that having the #2 PSA Willie Mays master set would at least warrant a response from someone.

Yes, they would respond. And there's a chance he might get reimbursed. But they often deny these sorts of claims.

They might bump it to a 9.

That might be the best solution. Raulus is made whole & the card is??? I wouldn't want it destroyed, but what is the solution to stop it from being graded by PSA a year from now?

I didn't think of that possibility.

They have a webpage that discusses their guarantee, and identifies how to contact them:

https://www.psacard.com/about/financialguarantee

I've sent them an email as they requested, to get the process started. We'll see how it goes. I'm not holding my breath. They have an autoresponse to identify that they work to respond to emails within 3 days.

I'm certainly more than happy to take the current market value for it, and hopefully they use it as a teaching moment for their graders. But both would seem like rather unreasonably high hopes.

Please let us know how that works out for you. I'm rooting for you.

If PSA actually pays you, then we are here

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/201...-s1100-c50.jpg

I would agree for the average collector. Raulus is not your average collector.

Good luck and keep us posted. Did you mention you are a member of net54? That might have raised the level of importance for PSA

HA.

No disrespect to this august body, but I'm not convinced they will be effectively swayed by my participation in this forum.

I haven't really considered how I'm going to approach it once they get back to me. If they are dismissive, then I'll probably have to find ways to push a little harder. And I suppose a little online pressure can sometimes be used to help a company do the right thing.

But we'll see how it goes, and I'll be happy to share the outcome when it unfolds.

My guess is they'll look at the data, suggest that they are two different cards, and thank me for my time. Or some variation on that theme.

I think the likelihood of being reimbursed for a recolored card is higher than for a trimmed card.

That would probably assure they blow him off. Like Nat cares about Net 54. I think having such a high ranked Mays player set might lend some credence though.

They're not going to care about a before scan of the card in question. All they can do, and I would argue all that they should be expected to do, is evaluate the card itself again, in hand. You can point them to the alteration, but if it is not detectable in hand, under a loupe, then it's not detectable. This is why so many trimmed cards get the thumbs up from them after being sent in for review. If it measures correctly and the edges look right, there's really nothing they can do. However, in this case, it should be detectable.

This is dangerous they could also lower the grade back down to a 7 and your Royally F&Cked…will only get compensated the difference.

Raulis just sit back take 72 hours and think this over sir. Again your collection is beautiful and you should be proud.

Are you sure there are more cards being doctored today than 10-20 years ago, as opposed to just more of a concerted effort today and better tools to out doctored cards?

Agree here. If they actually review it, the recoloring should be pretty evident once the area is pointed out, not that it ever should have to be pointed out. They are supposed to make sure cards like this do not get into holders.

Unlike so many other alterations that are much harder to detect once the card is in the holder, the recoloring is not. I think they write checks on cards like this when they feel the alteration is not masked by the fact the card is encapsulated. This is why their guarantee is utterly worthless.

I would take this deal every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The current value difference between a 7 and an 8.5 is well into 5 figures.

Now whether I should take the proceeds and invest it back into another comparable piece is another question, but I will cross that bridge if I ever get there.

At this point, I'm not sure what is being accomplished by BODA continuing to call out some of these cards. Particularly those which were altered by guys like Moser. It's not like we're going to further tarnish his reputation. I think the message that he alters cards is pretty clear by now. Continuing to post examples of his work can only hurt innocent collectors at this point. And the legal exposure for the BODA crew is very much non-zero. If they are wrong about a card and it costs someone money, they could easily be sued. Similar suits are currently pending, in fact.

Does every high end collector just sit around and wait for their turn in the BODA hopper now? Should we all just light our 401c on fire now?

Or perhaps the opposite will happen. The more that BODA posts, the more the hobby learns about what sorts of alterations are possible, and how they can be performed. Perhaps we will start seeing some of these well known card doctors offering their services with links to the BODA threads for free marketing, "As seen on BODA"

Very original Travis, see my post 16.

Lol. You must have planted a seed!

I read somewhere that Brian Brusokas is now working at PWCC. This is a joke, right? He's not really working there, is he?

I think continuing to out altered cards that have gotten past PSA has a lot of value.
Awareness and knowledge are important.

He has worked there for several months, I believe. Actually, I think he works for Fanatics, who owns PWCC (Hope that name goes away). Personally, I think he gives the new company a lot more credibility. I have always have been a fan of his, to the dismay of some collectors/dealers. One dealer whom I have called a friend for years will barely speak to me as he saw me chatting with law enforcement at the National. He's probably up to no good anyway LOL...

That all said there are FBI Special Agents who took his place, thank goodness.

I might add, I am a huge fan of Corndog and BODA at BO.....wish there were more of them!! Keep going guys....
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The latter. Much better tools than before. I am sure AI will make this work easier in the future.

Before bidding/buying any slabbed card, I now make it point to check the cert and any past sales before I jump right in.

Regarding the part in bold... That's good to know. Hope they are actually doing something and not just sitting on their hands. Would love to see some long overdue arrests, given the overwhelming evidence of fraud.

Pulling this out probably amounts to a non-sequitur at this point, but it caught my attention because I don't think I've ever seen KCC discussed on N54 before.

I would agree with you that what he does (at least on vintage) stops short of true card doctoring. If soaking a T206 is not a sin, then neither is using moisture / humidity to lift dents out of cards or to perk up pressed-down corners from screw cases. In the right set of circumstances in a musty attic or basement, the same thing could happen naturally. I know that his "spray" has drawn criticism too, but whatever it's ingredients - it's a quick drying formula that leaves nothing on the surface. I ordered a small bottle just to play with it, and had moderate success lessening the appearance of (not totally removing) light wrinkles and creases on postwar vintage on some test cards in my own PC. As I'm not setting out to do this for a living or even make it part of my hobby, (and his recommended practices if you do it on a lot of cards can be quite time consuming) I kind of quit after that.

Kurt does also have a "polish" for shiny ultramodern cards that seems to get out light scratches and imperfections. His videos are interesting to watch to say the least - and even though the polish to me seems to be a bit more in the vein of doctoring, I don't think he's ever had anything rejected by PSA or SGC. He's done everything from modern 1/1's to '52 Mantles it seems with good results.

This is interesting to me just because of the upfront, no secrets nature of it and the way Kurt runs his YouTube channel. Given recent events and indeed the original subject of this thread - it doesn't seem like he will run out of business anytime soon.

For those of us who grew up when cards were not worth much, or we didn't think so anyhow, I doubt any of us would have imagined doing any of this stuff to a card. I am not sure what that says, but it says something.

Yes, definitely. The question is to what extent? 2x? 5x?10x? More? Who knows. But it's far easier to get a micro trimmed modern card through grading than a vintage one. And now that the internet has effectively published a library of the different types of alterations that are possible along with the various techniques and tutorial videos on offer, paired with the overall growth of the hobby and a diverging opinion amongst younger collectors about what even qualifies as an alteration to begin with, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that the number of altered cards being submitted for grading today is probably at least an order of magnitude higher than it was 15 years ago.

The AI models would still have to be trained by humans though

I think it's more of a personality thing. If you have OCD like me, then you'd want your cards to be as clean as possible because you enjoy looking at them, regardless of value. I've cleaned countless $1 cards for my own personal enjoyment that I have no intention of ever grading or selling. I don't want a thousand other people's random funk on my cards.

I also have dirty cards in slabs that I really really really want to clean, but to do so would come at a great cost because they'd just end up with the same grade again after cleaning and resubmitting, and the grading fees on them would be in excess of $1k each

That may be the exception I would think; most of what is done to cards today seems in preparation for grading, regardless of whether or not it's deemed doctoring.

That's fascinating. OCD can manifest itself in many ways, it seems....

I have OCD (which runs in our family) but mine affects my collecting quite differently. If a card has any hint of doctoring or alteration, my OCD will immediately dismiss the possibility of owning it. Unless the card (or any collectible for that matter) is all-original, my eyes will always be drawn to the newly added color, trimming or bleaching.

Any aspect that is not original to the card itself will automatically deem the card useless to me. Weird... huh!

Not weird to me at all in fact THAT sounds 100% normal. You must have a different kind of OCD: Original Card Desires. I have it too and not seeking treatment.

Both are in DSM V or whatever we are up to.

OCD-1 OK with Card Doctoring
OCD-2 Opposed to Card Doctoring

LOL. Priceless.

Oh, I definitely don't want trimmed, recolored, or bleached cards either. My goal is to bring them back at close as possible to their original condition.

DSM IV > DSM V

And I have "OCD-3 That's not card doctoring" syndrome

Also, perhaps worth pointing out is that there is a significant difference between someone being a perfectionist and someone being clinically diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. The two are often conflated in casual conversations or nomenclature. To have true OCD, you generally will experience actual physical distress or anxiety if you don't perform some sort of ritual. Which can often be something silly, such as Nomar Garciaparra's routine when he gets up to the plate. Surely, he had OCD as well. When I was younger, I used to have to get up from bed and flip my light switch on/off 3 times every night, or I wouldn't be able to sleep.

To me lifting out dents or wrinkles is altering. I have doubts that the cardstock stays undented once it becomes dry again.

If the stuff wasn't so expensive, I'd say the spray sounds a lot like watermark detector fluid. But one little 3.4 oz bottle is about $20-25.

I once bought a PSA 8 1950s card with an obvious crease. PSA bought it back. I assume it had been taken out and came back, there was no way to have missed it.

Perfectly valid opinion. And I am not sure the extent to which certain dents or creases stay removed. Is it still altering if you cannot detect it a month or a year later? Maybe. But if unable to be detected, the hobby obviously isn't going to consider it altered permanently.

I got some old beater Batman cards given to me 20+ years ago. Someone had them in the basement and they stunk. I soaked them and it got rid of the smell and most of the wrinkles disappeared and the major creases turned into minor wrinkles.

I still have them someplace. I noticed a few years ago when I ran across them the creases and wrinkles have come back but not as bad as they were to begin with. For many years they looked really nice so in my case they did come back but it took several years before they started to reappear.

We all miss the Axis II disorders.

It depends on the extent of the indent and how you "fix" it. If the paper fibers were broken or torn, then you're not going to unbreak them. But most card stocks are like sponges. If it's dry, it's rigid, if it's moist, it's malleable. If you take a warped or dented sponge and you get it wet, it returns to its original shape. You could say it has a memory of sorts. Most card stock is the same. The issues arise when people don't know what they're doing and they try to "fix" indents by just smashing the hell out of a card. All they're doing is damaging the paper fibers. This can often be detected.

But if you simply toss a card into a humidor, you're not going to damage it at all, and you can often get the card to "remember" its original form, just like a sponge.

Here's an example: I put my 61 Koufax into a humidor and these surface indents disappeared. No smashing needed. Just some moisture was all it took. If this is considered "doctoring", then so is shipping a card from Vegas to New Orleans.

I think this is where claim that creases can return comes from. People finding creases in high grade slabs and assuming there's no way it would have been missed if it was there during grading. This assumption places more faith in the competency of TPGs than I have though.

OCD=Occupational Card Doctor.

This was blatant.

Did you get a respond from PSA on your concern?

In spite of their autoresponse that they would make every attempt to get back to me within three business days, it's been (/checks calendar) ~5 business days with no response.

In related news, I actually had emailed them a few days before about another matter, and they haven't responded to that email either.

So either they're ignoring all of my emails, or they're just slow. Or both.

Frustrating. I hope they back to you soonest.

We'll see. I think I've worked my way through the grief stages so that I'm now halfway in the depression stage, and halfway in the acceptance phase.

Maybe I need to work my way back to anger now!

I have been told that a sure fire method to eliminate creases, wrinkles, surface abrasions and soiling is to apply a small amount of nuclear waste, ensuring you are suited up when doing so. Supplies are often difficult to find, although I believe Japan is selling small bits through the dark web.
The only down side is the fact that your card is now radioactive.

The acceptance phase meaning you are OK with having altered cards as long as they get you those registry points?

I think when a collector is motivated to be the top of a registry they have to accept or deny the reality of altered cards being in their collections.