Some rose-colored glasses up in here. The core reason for PSA and BGS' existance is keeping their customers safe from fraud. lol 'This is fine' comes to mind. As if these companies will police themselves.

You get a flu shot every year to minimize your chance of getting the flu. You don't smoke (hopefully) to minimize your chance of getting heart and respiratory disease. You wear a seat belt to minimize your chance of getting killed in an auto accident. Nothing completely eliminates bad outcomes; you can, however, reduce the probability of them happening. Grading cards substantially reduces the chance of getting doctored cards; it does not eliminate it. Procedures will improve over time to reduce the probability of getting a doctored card still further. However, like in the prior examples, the probability will never go to zero. If you can live with that great. If not, you will never be happy.

Jay perhaps but they've been doing this for 28 years now. What's your basis for thinking things are improving? For me these revelations are confirming my wildest fears.

What is really being overlooked here, imo, is how good is the work that is being done? Nobody has answered this question no matter how many times I have asked it. It is pretty easy, in most cases, from what I have seen to tell the alterations from before and after pics. But what about cards that have never been previously holdered or cards that have never been sold online to have an electronic footprint? Is the work so good that it can't be reasonably detected by the advanced collector or by TPG's? I'm not interested in another response that "Oh the TPG's are the professionals and should be able to....". Yeah, I get that, but would this work be undetectable by 99.9% of people without before and after pics??

And it's a good question. I've never seen one of the cards in question in person.

I have posted several times that in my opinion, at least some of the work is very very difficult to detect given the level of review. This isn't crime lab review by any means.

Peter- First, I think grading has gotten marginally more accurate over time. I also think that because of the current situation, really a wake up call, PSA, if they are smart, will try to upgrade their procedures. I know if I was running the company that is what I would be doing. It's a public company. If management doesn't do this the board ought to step in and find management who will.

I think their grading may have improved, but I have no confidence that their authentication has. Big difference. Their corporate culture over the years does not give me much confidence that they will do anything more than close ranks, maintain their usual secrecy, do damage control, and try to shift blame and responsibility to others. And above all else, minimize by whatever means necessary the hit to that guarantee. So far their response has been a page out of that playbook. We will see and I hope you are right.

Procedures will also improve over time to increase the probability of getting a doctored card past the graders. But everything happening now is small potatoes compared to what eventually kills off the TPG business and probably the hobby itself -- AI and 3D printing technology advanced enough to fabricate new "old" cards identical to the actual old cards. It's not as though the molecules that make up a T206 Wagner are particularly scarce on our planet. At that point though I guess we'll have bigger problems to worry about.

Nail Squarely Hit!

Steve

The recoloring seems pretty evident, even to the naked eye in the scans. Maybe because it was pointed out?

That's entirely possible. If you know where to look, you'll be able to see it every time.

I'd really like to get one of these cards in hand to see how good the alterations are and if I can tell.

I will say that if the time allowed for inspection is under 1-2 minutes, the work doesn't have to be all that good.
Given a bit more time, and even pretty good alterations should be detectable without much technology. And given a very good amount of time and some specific info on that particular issue, there should be almost no undetectable alterations.

Present, ever growing list of doctored cards, notwithstanding...

Not sure if anyone read this ..

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/y...fraud.amp.html


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How was this resolved? It looked like you might have gotten hit with other Mosered cards, right? Did they inform you of all the cards you bought from all the possible known scammers when you contacted them?
Thanks!

https://beta.washingtonpost.com/spor...outputType=amp


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