OMG Blowout list of suspected trimmed modern cards
 

Mercy.
https://www.blowoutforums.com/showthread.php?t=1300356

Shame on PSA and BGS for allowing fraudsters the means to commit such massive levels of fraud, while clearly giving them preferential grades on top of it. Not only are they grading altered cards, they are OVER-grading altered cards and giving preferential treatment to the people submitting them. Unreal. The grading game is dead to me, because absolutely no graded card from either of these shit companies can be trusted to be unaltered and graded properly and fairly.

There seems to be no boundaries to the scope of this scandal, and what is perfectly clear is TPG's simply do not have the ability to detect the alterations. The card doctors are light years ahead.

I've been in this hobby for thirty five years, and I've seen various levels of fraud pretty much the whole way through. But this dwarfs anything I have seen to date. I am very curious how this is all going to be addressed.

Holy shit. If there are before and after pics for these cards, PSA and Beckett are in deep shit.

They just need to go away forever. A new system (or no system) is needed.

STOP SUPPORTING THEM, PEOPLE!

And do not look to them to fix the problem. It would be like asking Lance Armstrong to fix the doping issue for the Olympics. Just be done.

There are for a bunch. Then just like with Moser, they can put the submission back together and all cards submitted are considered tainted until proven otherwise. There is a thread on Robert Block in the member feedback section if you want to see a lot of the before and after pictures.

I’m sure that some of our members would not consider this evidence.:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

I wish this were the case legally.

The modern stuff is going to dwarf the vintage losses.

I can only assume 312 is working up a list for one or more other guys identified as modern trimmers.

If modern dwarfs vintage it will be because the other vintage guys haven't left the same tracks and the history goes too far back.

Agreed. It’s certainly not for lack of trying lol.

What I don't know is how these guys operate in terms of their submissions. Do they just submit stacks of altered cards, or do they try to throw the graders off the trail of the altered ones by mixing in clean ones, for example. Either way, it could end up a nightmare for people owning cards with certs in these subs but without the before and after pics. I imagine some will turn out to be obviously altered, but others may not be so obvious and some may even be legit.

Maybe some of the people here who profess such expertise in detecting alterations should offer their services.

There appear to be more altered cards than non altered cards out there. I think that we have to assume that every card is altered out there.

All I know is I will no longer be able to bring myself to make a large purchase of any PSA or BGS graded card/cards moving forward. Small stuff, whatever. I'll buy the card. But if you are talking anything over $50, no way in hell I'm risking spending my money on altered or over-graded cards.

+1

I was kind of thinking the same thing, even though we know some aren't.

Same here... and if I do cave in/get stupid or just cannot find it raw (and buy something a bit more expensive), it is getting cracked out the second I take possession.

It's a horrible situation, but at the same time let's not overreact.

Thankfully, not one PSA 10 Greg Jefferies rookie on that list. Phew.

It's just a list of cards and cert numbers. I did not see any evidence in that list. Perhaps you could point it out to me.

Who in their right mind would continue to send cards in to be graded by either company. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg. What a mess is coming.

I would agree to an extent. With the exception of references to cards already identified as trimmed by clear photo evidence, it's a list of SUSPECTED cards. Merely appearing on the list is not proof a card was altered. Depending on your point of view, there could be a presumption, although at this point that would not get one over the more likely than not threshold in a lawsuit and so it's more of an opinion/personal judgment. At the very least, though, it's certainly a red flag that anyone with cards on the list should -- if they care -- take proactive measures to further assess those cards. In my opinion, very valuable information for the collecting community. It's just a shame guys on the internet have to uncover this information which is much more readily accessible to the TPGs and to PWCC.

I'd say this is the first time in a while we are in complete agreement. If I'm reading that thread correctly many of the cards in question aren't even alleged to be altered, just bumped successfully at too high a rate to be considered legitimate. Well I certainly believe that's possible, and even likely, that alone is not proof.

If anything this shows how small the difference in the actual quality of the card between a 9, 9.5, 10, or black label is and how absurd the price difference is. A card in any one of those 4 holders would not look out of place in any other, most of the time.

I would be surprised if people hadn't figured out a way to exploit this. Way too much money at stake for a grader making whatever they make not to try to cash in.

Interesting that the only grading company which appears to have some evidence of crooked graders is Beckett.

I think if we had complete knowledge of these submissions we would see that many cards were altered, some were bumps (no comment at this point on any degree of corruption or favoritism), and some may be just regular cards thrown in to create the appearance of normalcy. The problem for the collector is how the hell do you figure out the story with YOUR cards. Beckett sure as hell isn't going to review them for you, and at this point who would trust them to do it anyhow?

Now some may be obvious when examined with a new and critical eye by the owner, but many may not be if this card doctor is as good as people say.

The BGS 10 (how the bleep can a card or subgrade be better than gem mint) and the Black Label thing certainly create a huge potential for BS.

NYT come to the rescue...
 

Time for another puff piece on PSA and PWCC to restore the public confidence and paint this as a matter of taste.

Why is anyone surprised by this? If a card is available in a 9 and the bump from a 9 to a 10 is many multiples I would be shocked if this didn’t happen. The idiots paying the multiples for a barely discernible change are fueling this. They are getting what they should expect. It doesn’t make it right, but it is none-the-less inevitable.

Perhaps our resident Forbes writer will accommodate you.

It was only a matter of time until #2 was outed in the Brent Mastro scandal. First Gary "Scissorhands" Moser and now you can Add

Robert "FAT KID ON THE" Block to the list of trimmers conspiring with PWCC. There are at least 8 more "conservators" working with Brenty Mastro IMHO so please be patient, they're working on it...

A Beckett 9.5 is already GEM mint. What on earth is a 10 then?

I expect a similar list for at least a couple more, on the modern side.

One thing I have yet to see mentioned is how Joe Clemons has strange cards intertwined into his BGS submissions. He got a BGS Black Label on a 2018 Topps Chrome Mookie Betts common with rough edges. Some see the grade as part of the scandal, I see it as a marker for the grader to know which submissions are Joe's. 'Mine's the submission with the Mookie Betts common.' That's how they know which one's are his so they can give him bullshit grades.

At some point I just gave up on trying to follow the twists and turns of that thread, and now they are making charges against Brian Gray of Leaf as well.

that's for now. We know PSA has been crooked and have played favorites to their dealer network especially PWCC for YEARS & YEARS. Hopefully the proof will come out in our lifetime but it will definitely come out. The truth almost always wins out in the end. You know that. :)

How do we “know” if the proof has yet to come out?

I don't collect many modern cards but one I follow is the 89 ud Griffey. A card with 2 9.5 sub grades and 2 10s (gem mt vs pristine) is still a 9.5 worth around 500 bucks. Upgrade one of those 9.5s to a 10 and the card is now a 10, worth about 3500. 4 10s is a black label, and now the card is 10-20k probably, I'd have to look it up. I couldn't even tell you the difference in card characteristics of gem mt vs pristine, other than the obvious, almost perfect vs perfect.

Probably in the bgs 10 black label Bo thread

I am highly skeptical cards above a 9.5 (or I should say with subs above a 9.5) would consistently regrade if resubmitted raw. Maybe it's not purely arbitrary (or corrupt) but hard to believe it's objective and reproducible. I can't even make sense of some of the subs on 9.5 and lower cards, particularly centering on some Star BKB.

His opinion, thought we beyond questioning opinions

So if you took a 9.5 Griffey and changed, say, an edge subgrade from a 9.5 to a 10 (seems completely arbitrary to me), that adds 3K value? SMH at that.

I have about 300 cards graded by PSA and BGS, but it's pretty obvious with this massive TPG scandal that the only way cards should be graded is with technology. There needs to be a system in place that if you ran a card through said system, the same said card would grade the same 100 times out of 100. Humans simply can not be trusted to be subjective and honest. Human-based TPGs should go the way of the Dodo bird. They're, inconsistent, unreliable, untrustworthy and not subjective.

Imagine the idiot who paid 125K for a PSA 10 52T Mantle back in, when was it, late 90s?

Perhaps something like...

Triple Dog GEM MINT with all Caps?

Double Secret GEM Mint?

Not every 9.5 has 2 9.5 and 2 10 subgrades. But yes on one that does that's all it would take. I'm sure it's been done many times before. Just like guys who buy 50 or 100 Henderson rookies in a 9 and send them in hoping 1 will bump I'm sure guys pick up a bunch of bgs 9.5 or PSA 10 89 griffeys and do the same. If one guy, or a group of collectors has someone on the inside awarding these bumps with or without merit it would essentially be as good as just printing money.

Dunno. But all kidding and TPG bashing aside, if people have cards on this list and the ones published before and the ones yet to come, don't play ostrich. There's at least a good chance they're altered considering the source. Above all, don't draw a false sense of security from the fact that BO guys have not found specific before and after pics, that doesn't mean much in this context.

That's funny, other hobbies have authenticators/tpg that take their time to get it right, and catch very nearly everything, without technology.

To use technology, you need a few things. The first is the knowledge to tell the technology what to look for. None of the TPGs have that.
Next, you need the ability to look at edge quality to be able to see the difference between a factory edge and a non- factory edge. If nobody knows the difference, they can't tell the technology what's good and what's not.

Technology is probably currently easier to fool than a relatively knowledgeable person.

I would not have questioned it if it was stated as an opinion. It was stated as a fact.

Interesting idea for an experiment though, if someone was willing to risk a black label by cracking and submitting it several times.

Doctored!

haha

How can either company remain trusted ?? If PSA fails to take responsibility admits their wrong, and pays back full value for their bad cards I will never trust them again.
I’m sure they will do nothing, very sad and par for the course in this industry. Hope PSA proves me wrong....not holding breath.

Wow. That’s a lot of submissions.

The longer the lists the better. Some self-deluding dolts, such as on the CU board, won't open their eyes unless they're hit over the head with a sledgehammer.

From what I am told, many more are in progress.

Agree the Kool Aid hasn’t stopped being consumed yet.....sheeple with Registry Cards...

While I agree with PSA cards I don't with Beckett. I have 2 of the 12 cards they graded in testing before they ever graded a card for the public. Since they are just practice cards i believe there was no foul play involved with them.:D

Interesting how they went from 4 digit numbers to three digit.

I have never seen any of the other 10 so I don't know how they got #ed but i do like how they did #007.:D

Is there a list of the worst card doctors or people in the hobby other then hauls of shame?

I once had a tour of the Beckett facility in Dallas. Sitting on the floor in a hallway was an open box of unused holders. I said "I could steal those and grade my own," and the Director of Grading joked "Don't bother. They are BCCG holders."

I think modern will always dwarf vintage in the fraud department due to sheer volume produced and the demand for current players. Maybe percentage wise it could be close but when the total numbers shake out I feel like you will see more altered modern cards than vintage.

So basically we all need to look at our own cards and learn to judge condition and authenticity?!?!?! F***!

Remember the SNL skit where the tv news set teleprompters went out and by the end of the half-hour news show the newscasters were living as cannibal savages?

Sports Card Radio has a running list.

Very geared towards modern though.

Mantle-Griffey J auto ?
 

Curious Beckett authentic--Is it possible this Griffey auto may have been added recently to this card and is it authentic, now listed as a auction on Ebay-- its appears signed with a bold sharpie quite different than all other examples I have seen on these dual signed card?

I believe all the cards were signed by Griffey, and just a percentage by Mantle, so the only possible forgeries are the Mantle.

That looks like Junior's signature, but not from 1994. His signature style was much different then, longer and more flowing and lighter hand. This is his smaller more current signature style. They did produce that card with just Mantle's signature and not Griffey so it's almost certain that this is the case, with the Griffey added probably just this year when he did the mail in private signing.

I've always wanted that card. Those are my two favorite players to collect. Any idea how that effects the value if Griffey did sign 10 or 20 years later?

I was one of the first members on that message board. A couple years ago I posted a questionable Gretzky PSA/DNA card. They not only banned me, but the mod at the time (Jackie) called my cell phone at 9/10ish EST and laid me out for the post.

I visited the site today to see how the fraud is being handled and it looks like the new mod is actually editing user's posts by changing or removing things said. That's a first for me on any forum.

The reason the members there will "not open their eyes unless they're hit over the head with a sledgehammer" is because they don't want to lose posting privileges. For most of the regular posters there, that forum is their life and they cannot function without it.

I understand that, and also understand/appreciate that it's a company website. No company is going to allow slamming of their product on their own site. That's why Beckett deleted their chatboard some years back.

Why stop at 10 when you can have...https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...f45af79a2b.jpg


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Crazy how many Gem Mint cards were being graded in those grading sessions, that has to be some kind of record! Yet no red flags!?! That one submission had 23 Jordan RC's in a row with 4 getting Gem Mt, then another has 19 Montana Rc's at one time with 14 getting 9's and the other 4 getting 8.5's! Why would they destroy the registry/pop reports with preferential grades like this for certain submitters? This all just blows my mind, they literally flooded the market with high grade high demand rookies!

This all makes me want to throw up to think of all the people out there that have been screwed by these con artists. These guys really need to do some really long prison sentences! Millions of $$ of fraud going on here.

Actually, Beckett deleted their chat board because the owners at the time believed it was not a "profitable" cost center. The uproar was so great the message boards were restored within a week. But that is how Chris Gilmour got Freedom Card Board up and running because most of the Beckett regulars went there.

Rich

And I may be off the timeline by a few days but the lack of a forum was part of the "NEW" Beckett web site which was teased all during the 2008 National and other ways.

As noted, part of the "NEW" web site was the lack of a forum which was not brought over because it would not be a money making part of the web site.

The outcry was so loud that within a week there was a new forum added and it took another week or so for the forum to be easily accessible instead of having to have several steps to find said forum.

Needless to say, I bet you could find the details of that debacle in the archives of Net 54 as I was actively posting on both boards in those days.

Within a month, the then owners were forced by their bank (read lending institution) to see to Eli Research now known as Entrust and they have remained the owners since then. But the forum debacle might have been the final clue about the true dire straits of the previous owners (who had purchased the company from Dr. Beckett)

Just some more non-needed details about how the Beckett forum going away had nothing to do with negative comments.

Rich

The older I get the more I realize I've become very odd when it comes to customer service. When I actually have authority to fix problems I prefer to talk to people who have had a problem. They are the ones that I learn things from that make me better.
Not that talking to happy people is bad, I just learn less from them.

If the Griffey Jr auto is not original to the card and was added later to possibly enhance the value, isn't this somewhat deceiving the Beckett Flip didn't advise the card had been altered.

Might this card be in the same category as other doctored cards not disclosing this fact ?-- (the card wasn't pulled from the pack as originally intended by the manufacturer)

Dryden RC apparently recolored from a 9 to a 10. It looks like the 52B Musial guy bought it.

https://www.blowoutforums.com/showpo...postcount=3068

I recall examples signed by just griffey, just mantle and both together. Have never seen one signed in thick sharpie. They used a fine point sharpie. You can tell the mantle is legit. Imo griff on that card added later

Interesting question. I don't really know the answer, and this is a unique example. No other card would be considered altered because the player on it signed it. Did the cards vary at all from the factory if they were dual or single signed? Would collectors care if the signature was added later?

I just like that it's the only card with my 2 personal favorite players from different eras on the same card. While I would prefer one that was pack issued with both signatures I could certainly see myself buying one with Griffey added later. Especially if this fact was disclosed and it saved me a few hundred bucks.