Former PSA employee AMA on reddit
 

Not sure if anyone else saw this, but it caught my eye. I don't know if they are still actively answering questions on the thread but it is worth a look.

https://www.reddit.com/r/baseballcar...k_me_anything/

Interesting; they've only answered a couple of the questions, so I have to think it's still ongoing. Looks like they've laid off a large number of workers in the shipping department due to their cancellation of the lower service levels.

So is that where my missing package went???

Its noteworthy that the guy states that every card is reviewed by at least two graders (maybe more if "contentious"). So that means that two graders authenticated this 1914 CJ reprint, the T206 EPDG Cy Young Reprint that was discussed here a few months back (dont have pic), and so many altered cards that BODA finds?

I don't believe it, myself. The math barely works with one reviewer per card.

I like the "my wife didn't give me any" or "traffic was horrendous coming in" vibe as an excuse for grumpy graders to downgrade. Someone needs to manage those power tripping special snowflakes, maybe a Snickers bar. Oh wait, the PSA big cheese is a member here, maybe he'll read this and tell his graders to not be such emotional basket cases on the daily and do their jobs.

I could say something, but I am going to bite my tongue.

#BobbyStrong

Bobby=Game Over.

Maybe on higher grading tiers but my hunch is that even at the $200 level it is one set of eyes per card for a grade to be assigned. There is a verifier but that person simply "looks" at the card once it is in the holder. I suspect 2 secs per card is spent on that part of the grading process.

Isn’t that AI machine grading cards now ? Or is that just high end cards that are being scanned ?

WTF PSA :eek:

https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1624925902https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1624925957

Nice Chris!

I love big borders I cannot lie, even blatant reprints on the sly.

Brian

Smdh.

I agree. I highly doubt that two graders are independently grading every card that comes through their door. Not for the low end stuff. The variance we see in results by submission is too wide for that to be the case. If multiple graders independently graded every card, the variance/inconsistency in grades wouldn't be nearly this wide. And it just doesn't make sense operationally or efficiency wise for the bulk $10/ea ultra-modern type submissions. They're jsut slamming that stuff through. I believe that they think they're grading them twice, but in reality the second "grader" probably just glances at the card and says, "ya, looks good to me".

For the higher end stuff, sure, multiple graders are truly looking at it. I'll buy that. But not the low end cards.


This is definitely not happening. I work in AI/machine learning. I code these algorithms every day for work. I can promise you there's no way in hell they're using "AI" to grade cards. (Nat, if you're reading this and want to know why the hell Genamint isn't working out as well as you had hoped it would, feel free to PM me.)

The graders are human. They make mistakes. For every one of these that slips through the cracks, they probably correctly reject 5,000+, but you never see the rejections, you only see the ones that slip through the cracks.

As far as BODA's "altered" cards goes... some of their posts are just getting ridiculous now. It's starting to become like the boy who cried wolf over there. I've lost count of how many cards they post where they say something along the lines of "I couldn't prove any alterations on this one, but posting anyhow for reference" or "I haven't identified the alteration on this, but I suspect there is one because 'a***a' submitted it". Meanwhile, there are 20,000+ "a***a" buyers on eBay, not to mention eBay assigns the same account DIFFERENT hidden ID's on every transaction lol. If you look at cards I've bought, my hidden ID tag is different on all of them. It's no wonder the FBI shrugged their shoulders after being presented with the evidence. Don't get me wrong, they've also found a ton of truly altered cards too, but the vast majority of those almost certainly couldn't be detected without a before (AND AFTER) scan of the same card side by side. Not to mention the hobby can't even agree on what counts as an "alteration" to begin with. And even if they could, that still wouldn't make it a crime to clean a card just because a group of ultra-purist collectors disapprove of it. These guys can sit there and dig up a million of these cards and it wouldn't change a thing. If anything, they're drawing MORE attention to what can be done to a card and what can't be detected. I would wager good money that the aftermath of BODA's efforts will actually result in MORE altered cards being graded than before. The FBI clearly doesn't care and neither does the hobby. If you think the next time that Honus Wagner PSA 8 trades hands that it's going to go for anything other than a new record because everyone knows it's trimmed, you're only kidding yourself. And the 1952 Mantle that started the whole BODA "investigation" thread? I'd take that card any day and would be more than happy to pay top dollar for it.

The FBI clearly doesn't care and neither does the hobby. If you think the next time that Honus Wagner PSA 8 trades hands that it's going to go for anything other than a new record because everyone knows it's trimmed, you're only kidding yourself. And the 1952 Mantle that started the whole BODA "investigation" thread? I'd take that card any day and would be more than happy to pay top dollar for it.

Quote from Snowmam Above.

Sadly I think this is where we are at in this hobby right now. People just don’t care anymore they’re numb to it.

I'm not numb to it. PSA will have to bend over backwards to regain my trust.

I totally understand with your situation Bobby and I feel terrible for you I hope they make it up to you and your customers. I was just referencing people don’t seem to care about the cards being altered seems like they take the more approach it in a holder that’s all that matters to me. That’s fine for people I guess with a lot of money they don’t care but I like to have a card with good history, clean, original/natural history.

Boda
 

99% of the people in the hobby have never heard of Blow Out Cards or BODA so they don't have a clue about the trimming scandal and they are not aware of that the card they are purchasing has been trimmed.

That's scary that multiple graders and this like this happen

PSA is a complete shit show. It was a shit show before Nat took it over and he has somehow made it worse. My latest sub just popped and it’s a friggin joke. Besides slabbing my 1913 World Series ticket stub as a game 2 instead of what it actually is, a game 3 their grades are a joke. I’ve slabbed lots of cards over the years. 9-10s on cardboard cards are now 8s. The lone 10 I got of course was a shiny modern card. And it wasn’t just me, I subbed this with some of the best eyes in the hobby and every single member of this sub got screwed over. 400 card sub. Grader Of Death.

Fingers crossed you get it back.

Can you shed more light on why AI doesn't work? And clarify whether your opinion applies to modern as well as vintage?

There could be a whole sea of issues. I think of three questions AI/ML could help with
1) Detect if a card is real or fake
2) Classify the card (type, year, etc)
3) Classify the grade

In all of these cases, I can assure you people want to know why the algorithm gave the grade/class/ etc, e.g. explain how the algorithm go to the result. This requires explainable AI, which is beyond what algorithms can do today. Furthermore, all of this requires a large training set (you need a lot of examples) including fake examples! Who has that many training examples sitting around?

What BODA has done is just awesome. I have nothing but respect for those guys. However, Mr. Snowman does have some solid points.

Yeah, that's a bit silly. Imagine having your ten-thousand dollar card posted up there, and yet they're not sure what was done on it. Now lots of people don't want to touch it ... gee thanks, guys.

Another solid point. This has been discussed so many times on here and we all know how those threads went.

This is actually very scary and it's probably true. Imagine writing a book titled "How to get Altered Cards past Graders" and putting it online for free! BODA points out every little detail here and there, and this is just the perfect way to educate others on how to commit fraud.

Snowman's POV reminds me of a guy who was just banned from Blowout for being a previously banned member.

But if the guy is a guaranteed trimmer, and he SOLD the card in the PSA holder first (mentioned in the post) as part of one of his PSA submissions, and it's a low POP PSA 10 vintage card, I think that is valuable knowledge. What do you guys think are the odds that raw card from gregmorris is now a PSA 10 that wasn't altered?

Should we be insulted he only turned to 54 after being banned twice on Blowout? :) I do hope he doesn't already have an alt -- see post on same subject by another new member just above.

In any case look forward to his insights on AI. Very timely topic.

Oof. That sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. Sadly, this seems to have become the norm. I've stopped sending even my high end cards to them for now because of it. I lost over 5k in wasted grading fees last month. SGC gets all my business now. PSA's moving of the goal posts has become a serious problem. And even worse, Nat Turner is somehow under the impression that this is a false narrative and that it's just a result of new submitters not knowing what they're sending in and companies like panini with poor quality control. Until he acknowledges that this is a real problem, nothing is going to change.

On the vintage side, I have seen some really inexplicably low grades.

I heard the same thing on modern from a dealer I know -- his best customer/consignor who submits LOTS of cards went from maybe a 75 to 80 percent gem rate on the new pack fresh stuff to 35 to 40 and was just beside himself.

Yes, I was banned on Blowout forums. My name there was JR42Collector. I was banned there for sending a strongly worded PM to one of the admins. It was a mistake. I won't be doing any of that here.

I would be happy to explain, in detail, all of the challenges that something like grading cards faces in the machine learning space. But it'll be a lengthy post and I currently don't hand the bandwidth to write it. Maybe I'll make a separate thread for it when I have time.

OK. As I am sure you know a lot of guys have touted it as the solution to all the problems brought out by the scandal, and it seems PSA new ownership has faith in it as well, although perhaps for different purposes. There have been a number of does too does not discussions here but I don't think we've had much contribution from people who really understand the technology. Maybe I missed them.

You missed it even in this thread. The short answer is:

There could be a whole sea of issues. I think of three questions AI/ML could help with
1) Detect if a card is real or fake
2) Classify the card (type, year, etc)
3) Classify the grade

In all of these cases, I can assure you people want to know why the algorithm gave the grade/class/ etc, e.g. explain how the algorithm got the result. This requires explainable AI, which is beyond what algorithms can do today. Furthermore, all of this requires a large training set (you need a lot of examples) including fake examples! Who has that many training examples sitting around?

I may be misunderstanding you and if so sorry, but is your opinion then that the technology in fact works for 1-3 but the issue is that the result can't be easily explained? Or does that mean as a practical matter it doesn't work?

No problem, it's fun seeing all the application AI/ML can have. Snowman is right its a very long discussion but I will try to give you a 30,000 ft view. You can create 1-3, but they would be very limited. There are technological limitations as well as practical limitations.

The easiest to understand are the practical limitations. So yes, if you can't explain the results the tools are useless. How crazy would the industry be if you received the following letter: "Dear Sir/Madam, our software has determined that your card has a 51% chance of likely being fake. Therefore, we are unable to certify it thank you for using our services."


The reason we can't explain the results are a technical limitation. Current AI/ML is a "blackbox" approach. You have an algorithm and train it on examples. Let's say I was creating an AI/ML tool to do 1) detect if a card is real or not. You basically show the tool a bunch of labeled examples so fake and real cards. It creates its own internal method to determine if a card is fake or real. You then test it on a bunch of cards that it has never seen before and compare its results to graders. If it does a good job you are good to go!

So where do the issues come from? Well if the algorithm has never seen a certain color, or a certain name before, never seen a type of error, there is a weird fleck of dust etc. Characteristics of cards that never existed in the training set (have you seen those cards that had a piece of fabric on them). So, you say well if it encounters something its never seen before it should tell someone to inspect the card! Well, that is an even more complicated problem (anomaly detection). Plus, it can't tell anyone what it didn't understand about the card that broke it (explainable AI). You might even say, well let's jus show it everything that has ever been graded before. This might cause something called overfitting, your algorithm is so fine tuned and specific that it will throw out anything not in its training.

It gets complicated the more you think about it. So this is essentially one of many problems just for the arguably easiest of the 3 problems.





There is no easy checklist to go through for grading a card. Just like with a human grader, you need to have the tool see a bunch of cards So you would say here is an image of a fake card long as you need to explain how you got your results AI/ML won't work.

Thank you for explaining. That makes a lot of sense to me. Sounds like it's not ready for prime time.

At the end of the day it’s just humans looking at cards. Wait, I’ve heard that before somewhere….

This isn't the PSA board, no need to be such an apologist.

The volume of "mistakes" they make is way beyond what's acceptable in any other job.

Referring to a comment about suspecting something based on the source..NO, it's just sensible. If great granddad bought rare stamps from Spiro brothers or Fournier or Sperati.... Yeah, there's an excellent chance most of them are fake.
Or US covers from John Fox, who also sold real ones.

If a card was submitted by a prolific trimmer/recolorer? Again, odds are it's fake.

Good for you. Enjoy your altered art projects. I prefer factory creations, not a Moser special.

And we now have some reference out there that can help collectors who don't want altered crap.

So BODA does plenty of good.

Sent from my SM-G981U using Tapatalk

The beauty of capitalism is that we have the freedom to choose from an array of different grading companies to review and encapsulate our cards in plastic. PSA isn't the only player in town, fellas. And as much as some seem to enjoy complaining about their service in numerous threads and across the internet in general, using a competitor of theirs works just as well, and you may actually end up preferring it.

So in more of a layman's terms, you think of the AI as like a new human grader who starts off not knowing much, but as they continue to see more and more examples of a specific card issue they get better and better at defining the exact condition of a card from that specific card issue and noting anomolies that would possibly indicate it may have been altered. That sound about right?

Assuming so, the obvious benefits would be that once the AI has had the opportunity to see enough examples of a particular card issue to be able to discern fakes and alterations, and accurately determine condition, you now have an experienced grader that won't ever quit, can work 24/7, will have no bias, can work faster than any human most likely without needing coffee or bathroom breaks, and it won't matter what side of the bed they got up on that morning.

The disadvantages would include that until the AI has had the opportunity to view enough examples of all possible conditions/issues of a specific card issue, it is still going to be in a learning mode and can possibly make mistakes, you are still going to need human input at least initially to be able to tell the AI what it is looking at and what it is/means when it encounters something it hadn't come across before, you'll need to be able to give the AI enough different examples to view, it will likely take a lot more time and human involvement to get properly established than one would think, and it may not always be cost effective if you are looking at some of the more obscure issues.

Especially when talking about vintage cards, there may not be enough examples of a specific issue out there for the AI to ever get up to being at an acceptable level of recognition. There will need to always be human knowledge and input in such cases. And for other card issues that do have significant numbers of such cards out there, you'll still have to wait until the AI has had the chance to go through enough of them for it to be able to render consistently accurate results, and I would have to assume this would include every brand new card issue that comes out. Until the AI has had a chance to go through enough examples of a newly issued modern card, wouldn't those initial reviews all be subject to possible errors and innaccuracies, and therefore require more human interaction and review?

To me, it would seem the TPG going to use such an AI would want to get all the bugs out of the system before actually launching its use, or at least as many as humanly possible. The TPG likely doesn't have a sufficient number of examples of every card issue out there, not to mention the new issues coming out every day, to do such testing all at once though. So does that mean they use the submissions they receive from customers to provide the sufficient number of examples for the AI to be brought up to speed? And if so, how long could that take before they get enough examples for every issue they grade to be okay to use the AI on? And do they do this testing for AI purposes along with their current human grading till they think the AI is ready, or do they just totally switch to the AI grading and have it closely watched and monitored by human graders till they think it okay to function alone. Either way, it will be interesting.

I'm not an apologist. I hate PSA. I'm just a realist. The "volume of mistakes" they make is only one number. You can't make a judgement without also having a denominator. Even 1 million mistakes would be pretty damn good if they graded a trillion cards.

14 CJ PSA Graded Reprint - colossal mistake...
 

I taste a little throw up in my mouth when I look at that card. It's a real shame when someone pays good money to got the completely wrong answer. And an answer any 6th grader could see if they compared that one to a real one. Not anywhere close...

Picture
 

Has anyone ever received this back from PSA ??

I never have in 30 years.

Is this on the research department ?

How could they not know what card this is ?

John it's like the old Elvis song.
Return to sender
Address unknown
No such number
No such zone

Hahaha yes it looks that way !!

By "fake", I take it you mean "altered"? Because I haven't seen any of these cards submitted by prolific trimmers/Van Goghs being called out as counterfeits by BODA. Also, I'm sure they submit plenty of cards that don't "need" altering. Just because they trimmed card A doesn't mean they also trimmed cards B through Z, particularly when BODA has scans of all those cards and "can't find any evidence of alterations" but posts it anyhow just because of semi-adjacent serial numbers. Also worth noting is that the trimmers are probably trying to sneak in their trimmed cards, surrounding them with non-altered cards in hopes that the trimmed one goes through undetected. I doubt there are very many of them who are truly just cutting up 100 cards and putting all 100 into one submission. That would be such a red flag and would greatly increase the probability of their entire order getting rejected and the submitter being banned. I would bet that the majority of cards submitted even by the Van Goghs and the cutters probably haven't been altered.

I get why they push the narrative though. These guys are spending countless hours every day trying to hunt down these "criminals", yet bearing no fruit despite devoting years of their lives to this. Meanwhile, the FBI (actual detectives) clearly couldn't care less about it. It must be extremely deflating. So they feel like they need to post something for their efforts. Can't allow an honest good day's work to go to waste, so here's a non-altered card for you! Who knows, it might be altered and we just can't tell lol. They're grasping at straws. It's not a good look. They're crying wolf.

Also, their method of tying sales to particular individuals is flawed. Saying they know a card was purchased by Moser because the buyer ID is 'm***1' (or whatever it is) somehow proves it is beyond laughable. There are countless 'm***1' usernames buying cards on eBay; literally thousands of them. Not to mention the fact that the username 'garymoser123' would have 132 different permutations that eBay uses at random for their purchases (12 Permute 2 = 132). They purchase a card and it shows as 'm***1' today, but it's 'g***e' tomorrow and '2***y' the next day. Don't believe me? Go to eBay, log out, and then look up your own eBay purchases and see what it lists you as. You'll have a different masked buyer ID for each one.

My favorite posts in those threads are the ones where BODA posts pics of a card that is accompanied by the "I couldn't detect alterations on this card, but the serial number is only 37 away from this other one that was trimmed, so something has probably been done to it. Here it is. I'm posting it for reference." Then the next 5 pages of comments are just pure gold.

• "You can see the top edge was trimmed! Just look at it!"

• "Oh wow, ya, they MURDERED that left edge! See that?"

• "Look at the right edge, I think they took a dental tool to the right edge!"

• "That bottom edge looks off. Something isn't right with that. I think they sanded it."

• "Look at the bottom right corner, that's a rebuilt corner. I know one when I see one!"

• "No, it's the top right corner. See the angle on it? They cut the entire corner off and gave it a new corner, then trimmed it and shaved it down!"

• "Look at the red background, that's supposed to be orange. They definitely recolored this card!"

• "Something looks off with the font. I think they recolored the name too."

It's absolutely hilarious. These guys have no clue what they're looking at. Every aspect of every card now looks altered/fake to the entire army of BODA's fanboys. But hand them a stack of raw cards, all of which were rejected by PSA or SGC because of alterations, and they think they're holding pure gold because, hey, "not slabbed = not altered" lol. Some of this stuff is pure comedy gold.

If I could venture a guess.....I know they laid off a ton of people in shipping and receiving when they shut down services. I am thinking they laid off people in the research department as well. They probably never graded that particular issue before and just couldn't be bothered with it. In case you haven't heard, THEY LOST A 123 card order I had with them!!!! If you submit ANYTHING to PSA right about now, you are taking a big risk. Raw may come back in vogue.

With all the money being made in grading you think this should never happen.
Hopefully changes for the positive come soon

Dan -

What follows is a serious post, I am writing this from a bench in my yard, I am attempting to leave my usual snarky, sarcastic, possibly annoying self in the house, apologies if he finds me before I hit the "Submit Reply" button.

Your post is EXACTLY what I don't understand about why the opinion sellers exist. Why would "some of the best eyes in the hobby" pay somebody else for their opinion? They should be paying you guys. I understand that the resale value of the slab has become more important that the value of the item within the slab, but... really, why?

It can't just be greed, there has to be another reason, right?

Everybody on this board is at least a bit greedy, including me, but none of us (very few of us?) got into the hobby because of the piles of cash we could make. So, why is the hobby so beholden to the opinion sellers who time after time after time continue to prove that they don't really know what the fuck they are doing?

Doug

Doug, I suppose the easy answer is because a card inside the PSA slab is worth way more than the same card outside of that slab. I sent my cards in precisely for that reason. Clearly though the standards have changed and I believe Nat gave direct orders to be stricter on all cards, especially certain issues. You can have a great eye and try to sell a card but it’s always going to get more money inside that slab.


As a side note for more anecdotal “proof”, one of our submitters cracked three 1984 Donruss Mattinglys all PSA 9. He believed they could come back as Gem 10s. They came back as 7, 7 and 8.

Unless they can rely on a certain percentage of 10s, people who submit large volumes of very modern cards may rethink things if their gem rates become substantially less. Maybe that's what Nat Turner wants, to become a lower volume higher dollar per card company?

Ouch!!!

Hands down, this is what sucks the most about PSA right now. The moving targets. I have about 150 or so 1986 Fleer basketball cards that are all 8s, 9s, and what historically would have been a few 10s. But after watching the goal posts get moved, it makes me not even want to submit to them anymore even if they do reopen bulk services or quarterly specials. They'd probably all come back as 7s with the recent changes. It's extremely frustrating. It's not that difficult to maintain consistency over time. It messes up the entire market too. A 2021 PSA 7 is a 2016 PSA 9 is a 2002 PSA 10.

SGC looks better and better every day.

This was my logic as to why my cards were worth more since they were PSA graded than they were raw. However, when it came time to declare value and file the insurance claim, PSA chose to ignore their graded card value. Why not just make all cards $99 (or whatever the max value is) and be done with it.

This has always been one of the problems with TPGs giving their "opinions" on card grades, and especially with autograph authenticity, the fact that they have different charges based on perceived values of items they are looking at and not just charging based on the actual work being performed. The grading/authenticating process should be consistent and without prejudice and bias for all cards, whether they are looking at a '52 Topps Mantle or a common from the '87 Topps set. They should be doing similar work and efforts for both cards. But are they when they end up charging so much more for one card than another, it creates at least a perception of potential bias, if not also a factual one to some degree. And it is even more pronounced with autographs. Think about all the Mantle and Dimaggio autos that TPGs have authenticated over the years. Their authenticators have reviewed and handled so many of them by now they probably need do very little research to authentic such signatures, whereas someone coming in with an autographed card of some minor league player that had a cup of coffee in the majors might require a bit of research and work to actually end up verifying the signature, at a fraction of what they charge for a Mantle or Dimaggio.

At the end of the day, all the TPGs are doing is giving an "opinion", nothing else. So why do people let them get away with basically charging a contingent type fee on the supposed value of a card/autograph they are grading/authenticating? CPAs are also in the business of giving "opinions, yet the entire profession is not allowed to charge contingent fees on "anything" they do, not just in giving opinions on financials. CPAs have to maintain an unbiased, arm's length relationship with clients and can only charge for the work performed, or potentially lose their license. I would think/hope that any TPG offering grading/authenticating services would be following a somewhat similar line of thinking in being completely impartial in fact and appearence, but they are not. And the grading companies should never have been the ones to decide what the grading standards were. The people in the hobby should have gotten together and decided, and made all the TPGs follow one single, consistent set of grading standards, along with making them submit to periodic, independent, third-party review of their procedures and practices to insure they adhere to those standards or practices. But is probably too late to ever have that happen now. Too many people with too much to lose are in the card hobby industry and will not allow the risk of such a loss to them personally to happen by making such radical changes to the hobby now.

My comments in red.

Thank you, so it is just greed.

And your story of the resubmitted cards is further proof that the opinion sellers don't really know what the fuck they are doing.

I don't know what 1984 Mattinglys go for in a 7 slab, but I will admit that I hope it's less than 2 X submission costs...

Insert smiley face here

Doug

Some people may call that a good business decision and some may call that greed.

Your Schadenfreude is noted. :confused:

Looks like the former PSA employee stopped answering questions and deleted his reddit account shortly after the PSA manager showed up and posted a rebuttal to some of his claims. Interesting.

I would argue that paying somebody for their opinion (especially in the context of REpaying somebody for their opinion), when the opinion seller has shown repeatedly that their opinions are hit or miss at the very best, is not misfortune, but is something closer to foolishness. Therefore I do not have a feeling of schadenfreude, I do however have a feeling of "they got what they deserved". Or, in the vernacular of today's youth I believe the letters SMH may suffice.

Right now?

May I remind you that the first opinion they ever sold is pretty much universally acknowledged to be wrong?

alot of information in this particular thread and alot to process.

Thanks all for the information and perspective

Did a quick search online and it looks like this card is supposed to come numbered out of 175 on the front and yours does not have such numbering?

Thanks!

I have no idea, I know the Auto is good.

I wonder if yours wasn't serial numbered because it was supposed to be a replacement card that somehow later found its way outside the factory? I've heard of stories like that before.