Cards still being outed on Blowout -- PSA 9 Monte Irvin in the recent ML
 

Judge for yourself.

https://www.blowoutforums.com/showpo...&postcount=134

And this is the Jackie he references.

Disturbing, if true.

https://www.blowoutforums.com/showpo...&postcount=130

Not gonna judge because this is the hobby in 2023. Not ever sure who is to blame either. I just know it is not for me but not a shock either. I would love to be able to conclude that it does not impact me, directly but this kinda shit happens on valuable lower grade stuff too.

The irony since this exact house just had 3 or 4 threads dedicated to it and filled with posts by members here who could not be any more effusive with compliments.

Gonna have to start paying more attention to that board it is better suited to watchdog posts like that.

LOL, seriously do more than 3 people care? If you are buying a PSA 9 vintage card you know it is altered or you have your head buried so deep only your toes stick out.

At least the altered Irvin card was shipped quickly!

Zing!

Funny ML pulled one of my graded consignments based on a board members opinion to authenticity. Maybe if they'd known before they could have pulled this.

Not to single anyone out because most do it, but if you're willing to accept consignments from people with bad reputations or who have now been specifically outed, then inevitably you are going to get some bad cards.

One word I can use to describe how the hobby in general feels about this in 2023.... Apathetic they just don’t broadly give a Sh$t if it’s in a holder with number grade.

I believe it has been like that since grading became a thing. A few have always cared but overall nobody cares. I have been on this forum for 10 years now and this has always been the same discussion on here.

I should be shocked and scandalized and should say it is a

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...wn%20cries.gif

day for the hobby, but given what is now reams of evidence of doctoring on postwar high numbered slabs, my reaction is really more

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...%20Ha%20Ha.gif

The risks and consequences are known, like smoking, and if someone still is willing to go there and winds up with an altered card, instead of outrage, I am at the

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...20bitching.jpg

stage.

The best way to deal with this stuff is to not play in the first place. Just don't.

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On a percentage basis, that Monte Irvin has to be tough to beat of any doctored card -- from $50 to $30,000. :eek:

LOL, I’m having a hard time getting 3’s and 4’s on seemingly very well preserved cards. How the hell are the grading companies still handing out 9’s on 53 Topps, without being suspicious of it?

:rolleyes:

Once more, with feeling. All submitters are equal. Some submitters are more equal than others.

Let’s all say it loud and with feeling …..

Cards*that*are*70, or 80, or 100 years old*will*not*naturally*exist*in*pristine*condition *

If people didn't pay stupid money for cards in these grades, then there wouldn't be any incentive for these guys to keep churning out altered cards. I think this is the reason nobody cares. Because a lot of the high end buyers actually are aware that this is happening on a large scale, and it simply doesn't bother them. I know Rick Probstein said it wouldn't bother him at all if he learned that numerous cards in his collection were found to have been altered. He just wants that high grade and that PSA slab stamp of approval. And Nat Turner is another high end buyer who without question now knows the extent to which these cards are altered, and it hasn't changed his buying habits one bit either.

I think Evan Mathis was right when he said that these guys just don't care how a card got into that 10 holder, they just want that 10 or that 9. He mentioned a story about needing a 10 for one of his registry sets but no 10s existed yet, so he called up some cards doctors he knew and tried to have them create one for him. That's what these guys want.

This is an entirely self-owned problem. I have zero sympathy for these guys buying these cards. And from their perspective, it's pretty much no risk because they can always just find another buyer for them. Even if the card gets outed, nobody cares. Not even the FBI.

A fool and his money will soon part.

What a world. Next we know, the card doctors will be openly advertising and competing to supply custom altered cards to meet registry needs. They can provide testimonials and even show off their work using Blowout posts. They can tout their success rates getting alterations past PSA.

That's a reflection on what he's calling a rebuilt upper right corner.

Here's a different image from another sale of the same card.
Attachment 589494

I was kind of wondering this myself. Apparently there must be a well known listing of doctors in some circles, and one needs only place an order for a custom piece. Only a matter of time before they start advertising in PSA’s magazine, and then maybe the major card graders and production companies will get into the business too by buying up all that sweet doctoring talent. Drop off and pick up offered at all major events. A single login and form to buy, doctor, grade, with fast return shipping. Guaranteed results. Vertical integration baby!!

The irony is so rich that PSA supposedly was started to put a stop to card doctoring.

It was so people would stop being fooled by sharpie markers on 71' Topps cards...full stop.

:D:D:D

What’s the saying? “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!”

Those would probably make it through the assembly line now. There is probably one blacklight in the grading room that is broken out for special occasions. :)

If I was an innocent buyer who learned about this blasphemy, I might have a few sharp question for ML.

The slab and flip give auction houses the perfect cover. It's a rigged game.

100 percent that the big money doesn’t care. Just another example of the power of grading card companies.
These blowout posts are useful, but I agree, nobody cares.

Drew, there are several what I consider to be "big money" collectors here on Net54, and I believe ever one of them cares.

I say no one cares sometimes for effect, or because I'm so disgusted, but the truth is a lot of people still do. And that's why none of these asshats who facilitate the card doctors' sales EVER disclose alterations. If nobody truly cared, why not just disclose?

I think more collectors cared when it appeared something might actually be done about it. And while it might not be accepted by the entire industry I think many just remain silent because how many times can you whine and complain before you annoy everyone? I think there are a lot of collectors who would support the hobby being cleaned up, if that were possible. It is undeniable that there is a segment of the hobby who truly does not care and we have seen posts by some of them here.

Part of the fun here is that it seems like a hopeless business.

Let’s say I have some high grade cards. I hope they’re legit and not doctored. I’ve dug around on the lists of doctored cards to make sure mine are not on those lists. I suppose that’s a good first step. If I did have pieces that were on the list, I’m not sure what I would do about it, particularly if I picked them up years and years ago. Probably include a disclosure about it being on the list when I go to sell?

But when I hear about some high grade cards that are doctored, what should I do? Do I make a bunch of noise and jump up and down? Post stuff around here berating the TPG responsible? Do I send a strongly worded letter to PSA? Do I stop using PSA to grade my cards? Maybe that’s what people are hoping for, so PSA will lose market share and feel our collective wrath and desire to atone for their previous sins of not catching these alterations.

Obviously that seems like an unlikely outcome.

About the only other option available to me is to dump all of my PSA graded stuff, either out of principle or because I’m paranoid that someday everything I hold will lose value when the shine comes off of the PSA brand due to their many failures. And from henceforth I only collect raw stuff that I hope hasn’t been altered?

I suppose that’s an option, but it seems to be a pretty extreme approach to take.

But maybe others have some brilliant ideas on the appropriate approach for someone who cares but also happens to have an extensive existing collection built largely around high grade pieces graded by the TPGs?

Do you care to the point where if you found out a specific card was altered, you no longer would want to own it? Or are you just worried about the value of the flip?

Cool. Let’s dig deep into my motives to make sure they are sufficiently pure.

First and most importantly, I would certainly enjoy it less. Every time I saw it, I would shake my head and glare at it menacingly, holding that I could somehow avoid the conundrum now facing me, and perhaps cleanse it of iniquity through the power of my disdain. And I would probably cast about, trying to figure out what I should do with it, and how to get rid of it, since it no longer brings me pleasure.

I’m not sure how I go about getting rid of it though. It seems like it’s not appropriate to sell it to someone else. PSA isn’t going to honor their guarantee. SGC has no guarantee (other than the false advertising one in the name).

Do I chuck it on the burn pile and burn it?

Obviously that’s easier to do if it’s not worth much. If it was worth 5 or 6 figures, now it’s a serious pickle.

Aren't we all taking a leap of faith when we pay large and sometimes huge premiums for the graded material we put our money into? Are we doing so be cause we believe the company is solid and will continue to be respected enough at least until we deem it time to sell? Or possibly because we know there are others who are buying into the same brand? How many people have to exit before the value of that holder is diminished? What if, as has happened, one of those companies goes under for fraud? Sure we still own the card but how much of that card's value is due to the initials on the holder? And what if that card in that holder is altered or might be altered and it cannot go into another company's holder with a numerical grade?

I'm 100% sure that some cards that only bring 2-3 figures are being doctored pre-submission/re-submission, but those buyers generally don't have the voice or resources to elevate the issue as a problem that needs to be dealt with.

Those that have 5-6+ figures to spend on a slab are the ones that can police this issue and they don't seem to be doing it. I don't know if they have some kind of sunk cost issue where they don't want to disrupt the market/portfoliio they've already invested in or if they're ignorant it's happening on the scale it's happening.

This is before taking into consideration the sheer amount of doctored stuff that happened decades before grading was even a thing and had a chance to "naturally" age, hiding some of the doctoring that was done decades ago.

I think every grader out there has issues with some stuff like 1955 Bowman baseball, which is all over the place pack-fresh. I've seen an enormous amount of 55 Bowman baseball in slabs that doesn't seem to pass the eye test, but it's out-of-the-factory variation gives it a lot of cover for grading.

Therein lies the problem.

A lot of faith and trust given the huge sums involved, yet based on incidents like this one, tragically misplaced.

And with not a lot of viable alternatives, especially if we fear the raw space is equally fraught with alterations.

You could sell it with disclosure. Nothing at all wrong with that. If no one cares, it won't matter.

PSA has just introduced a prototype of their newest 'Qualifier,' meant to quell concerns over altered cards being ignored by their graders.

Man, they really got balls!!!


Attachment 589526

Seems like the only way to go then. Either that or perish from the extreme ignominy concomitant with possession of a known altered high grade card, and leave it to my heirs to sort it out.

The faith and trust are 100% misplaced but not sure that results in being left with a worthless investment. If you believe the posts on blowout, SGC and PSA have been shown to holder bad cards with too high of a frequency. None of what has been brought to light has remotely hurt their businesses. It is anyone's guess if that might change in the future.

THAT's the real IRONY;):confused::confused::rolleyes::eek::cool:

There giving them to somebody, though we're not in on the GAG

FFF Favor for friend
TBG Trimmed but graded
MAO Minor alterations only

The reason this is even an issue is because the card on the left is a $50 card and the one on the right is a $30,000 card. If the market is telling folks they can take a $50 investment and turn it into $30k in a week with minimal skills, tools or risk, why not play the game?

Is there any logic in this? It's a House of Cards, literally. And we know what happens to those. The prices may collapse, but no one is going to be held responsible.

Val, they might say the care, but I believe the card and the grade supersedes that initial feeling.

Collectors might, but the ship has sailed on cleaning up the hobby. Too much money and too many people itching for that high grade.

There are thousands of us in the hobby. You are surely overgeneralizing. Many do not care, and many do.

And that is zactly why I qualified my statement with ..."if that were possible".

Don't fool yourself if ya think this a high grade issue. It is an issue that exists in any card that has enough value that it is worth being altered.

This times x1000

This is already happening. Kurt's Card Care does a live stream every Wed night on Instagram where he fixes various flaws on cards from vintage to modern to Pokemon. He's very open and honest about everything he does to improve/restore a card's condition.

I've also talked about the fact that I clean cards myself. If I had the time or the desire to be a content creator, I'd have zero qualms about sharing exactly what I do publicly. I don't consider what I do or what Kurt does to be altering cards. Neither of us trims, recolors, or rebuilds paper stock or anything like that. Everything I do is allowed by every grading company. I've never once had a card rejected because of something I did to it.

This is not a rebuilt corner on this 53 Topps Jackie PSA 6. That's not missing paper in the scans. It's a bent corner and the light is reflecting off it in a way that makes it appear like it's missing paper. But it's not. This card has simply been soaked in water and dried flat. That bend would go away just by soaking it in water.

Again, this is happening right now. PSA employees are even referring customers to Kurt's Card Care to fix flaws on cards before grading. Heritage Auctions has a guy who performs significant restoration/conservation work to raw cards prior to submitting to PSA/SGC. I know this first hand, for a fact. Dick Towle used to claim that he cleaned cards for every single major auction house. I believe him.

Black lights are not the magical alteration discovery tool that many forum members seem to think they are.

Peter, sure, some care, but enough to give up on an already slabbed high end card they want? I doubt that.

This whole post is on that psa 9 Irvin. Keep us posted if the buyer send back to the auction. Or if the auction comes out with a statement.

A lot of good prospectives on this post, I appreciate what Drew and Snow have to say. They’re keeping it real, it’s the reality of the situation. Sure cards may be trimmed in holders and they may have turned a 30$ into a $30,000 card but what can you do about it other than talk, nothing. It’s the way things are, I go back to a quote once told to me by a wise veteran on the job, he told me, John, you might not like it but some things you just have to accept or it will drive you crazy.

As far as disclosing we are thinking way to highly of people, with the monies these cards are worth in holders, that's sugar pie in the sky fairy tales and daisies.

I know and that's why I posted a different image of the card. I despise the card doctors and scammers in the hobby but I think they're getting carried away with some of the so called alterations that they are pointing out on blowout. The only thing you can prove from the scans of the Jackie card is that it received a grade bump. I don't see a bent corner that you're seeing either.

I'm all for pointing out alterations and outing the guy's that are altering the cards but if they don't limit it to definitive proof they lose credibility IMO.

This is the result of the investors beginning to outnumber the collectors. A quick perusal of Blowout Forum (flipper central) will net you a an 80/20 positive thought level on card doctoring. The history is backseat to the profit margin.

Sadly as technology progresses this is what I believe will kill the hobby and many more. I envision a 15-20 window before advancement steps up to repair or create such perfect replicas that they will be virtually indistinguishable from original. The TPGs will be rendered useless and it money for purists will possibly flip to low mid grades in the oldest holsters possible. Who knows, but technology will kill history

When Brent offered refunds for cards that had been outed, plenty of people sent theirs back because they didn't want them. I suppose some could have been motivated by fear the card would be tainted for a future sale, but I would bet a lot that many genuinely did not want them. Don't underestimate how some of us, particularly of a certain age, grew up in a hobby where trimming and recoloring were viewed as unethical, and altered cards were vile.

Speaking of the future, if it’s so easy to create a high grade card today, I would expect the pop numbers will start rising dramatically, and prices should fall, because the supply should easily outstrip demand. Particularly if you can spin $50 into $30,000 with so little effort and relatively few skills.

With any luck, the doctors will put themselves out of business by driving down the price for their work.

What? They've been at this for decades. Do you see prices declining?

I can’t imagine paying $30,000 for a common card of Monte Irvin, altered or not. I spent $3 on my copy, I have a hard time seeing as how removing the creases and giving it sharp corners would increase my enjoyment 10,000 times the current level of enjoyment.

If ‘collectors’ didn’t require validation and a label on a 1-10 scale this fraud would not me so immense and profitable. People’s ego’s needing the highest number is inevitably going to produce astonishing levels of fraud when it is so easy to create the items they are paying silly amounts of money for.

How many of us gave up this grading sham once we realized just how fake most of these cards are and the utter incompetence (at best) of PSA to detect it? It seems to mostly be people who never bought in in the first place, people against the fraud but continuing to participate in the game anyways, and people who just don’t care or actively cheerlead or defend fraud.

With PWCC now under new management, applying new standards to both bidders and consigners, and, hopefully, severing relations with known 'fixers', I hope the integrity of their auctions will improve. At a minimum, when receiving a highly graded vintage card, they should do their own due diligence and check Blowout to see if the submitted card has been outed.

When I see a 70+ year-old card in a PSA 9, I assume that it's been altered.

And it's absolutely nuts to me that someone would pay $29,950 more for a card that barely looks any better than the 5 just because someone looked at it and slapped a higher number on the label.

Which probably is a sign that it can’t be that widespread and/or easy to do.

Don't you wish.

Among other things we are not talking about a static demand and supply curve, but huge outward shifts in the demand curve over time. As more and more examples of iconic cards have been graded over time, e.g. the 311, prices should be declining under your theory independent of doctoring or not. Not so.

Put your economist hat on. When something is easy to do and you can make bank, then everyone will rush in and start doing it.

There are many card doctors. Trust me. Look at all the ones exposed on Blowout and they missed or could not pin down several of the most important ones.

Some people may actually have morals and not do it even though they could.

That’s a good possibility, although I’m not convinced that’s a factor here.

I would submit 3 hypotheses:

1) maybe it’s not that easy to do, or at least the success rate is low.
2) the sheer number of cards and issues out there means that even with widespread doctoring, the doctors struggle to meaningfully raise the relative number of high grade cards.
3) it’s not really all that well known by the general population as a route to riches.

Why does that apply only to PWCC/Fanatics?

2 and 3. Not 1. Also as I posted before, constant outward shifting of the demand curve means increased supply won't reduce price.

As to the ease of trimming, it's super easy and I did it myself.

If you take a stack of cards, of basically any year and any set, there are natural size differences. I'm opening a box of 2022 Heritage High Number right now, lining up the cards from the last 3 packs on my desk, so that the bottom edge of the card is against the flat surface of the desk, I can discern with my poor and glaucoma ridden eyes that the cards are very slightly different heights. This provides the margin by which one may trim the card without leaving much evidence. Even to this day card production is not so good that the size tolerances are not perceptible to the human eye.

Using the modern tools and trimming methods, which I don't want to fully state but 'if you know you know' and they are not to hard to find. They require no expensive or unusual tooling or particular skill. I took some 1990 Score football and micro trimmed them last year. I chose these because they are worthless, I have them sitting around, and the border design lends itself to make a sizing difference more easily discernible to the human eye with the white striping pattern, so they are more difficult to shorten without it being noticed. After handling the cards a bit to produce slight corner wear at the top and bottom, I micro trimmed them. Didn't even need to practice or anything before I produced cards I knocked down to EX-MT and then cut to perfect corners and normal size, without any way to really see they were trimmed.

Edge coloring can help ID a vaguely recent trimming, among other things, but especially with modern cards, it's nigh impossible without before and after scans to have a high success rate at the identification.

By the way, from Blowout, several low pop 9s including a pop 2 were in the same PSA sub as the Irvin, but have not been put up for sale yet. Stay tuned.:D The best is yet to come.

Riffing on this theme a bit more, what’s to keep a relatively amoral group like organized crime from setting up their own card doctoring operation to supplement their other economic activities?

They certainly wouldn’t have any moral objections. They have an army of low-skilled labor at their disposal. And enough capital to buy the equipment and training to set up shop.

You could imagine an army of buyers trained to sift through auctions to find raw and low or mid grade pieces ripe for grade bumps with a little doctoring. All those cards end up funneled off to some warehouse where a sweatshop filled with card doctors labors day and night with their tools and a little training to improve those cards for superior grading. If they wanted to skip the learning curve, they could even hire one of these existing doctors to manage the operation. Or if they wanted to skip paying for it, they could squeeze him to give up his secrets.

The thought is a little terrifying, as thousands of cards per day could be doctored and pushed through grading, and out onto an unsuspecting hobby. Before you know it, the number of high grade copies for every issue and every player would swell to the point that supply might finally exceed demand. Might take a lot since demand is so deep. But when that point finally arrived, the prices would inevitably fall.

And if you’re worried that a domestic group would worry about detection by law enforcement, then there’s nothing to prevent international groups in Russia or North Korea or Sicily (or all of them together) from setting up such an operation.

Wut? Or perhaps, whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Sarcasm perhaps?

I disagree about point #1. At least for some of these cards. The bottom left corner on that Monte Irvin has been completely rebuilt. Paper stock and top layer/paint. This is not some amateur job. This is the work of an expert. You could probably count on one hand the number of people in the hobby who are capable of performing an alteration like this.

If we're talking about trimming, then sure. A lot of people have paper cutters. But even at that, I don't think you can just grab a random vintage card, take a slice off of it, and get a 9 nowadays. If that were the case, these pop reports would indeed be blowing up. But that isn't happening.

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that during his interview with that podcast, Mathis talked about buying up several PSA 9s of a card that he wanted a 10 for with one of his registry sets and sending them all to a card doctor in hopes that just one of them could be turned into a 10. They weren't just grabbing random cards, like 5s or 6s, and cutting them up and getting 10s. They were looking for near-perfect cards and trying to make very minor improvements. This tells me that nobody within even his well connected circle of highly skilled card doctors was capable of performing an alteration like the one we see on this Monte Irvin card.

Fair enough. Some of the work is highly skilled.

Maybe?

Setting aside the morals and just putting my economist hat on, it seems like the natural progression. If it’s really easy to do, requires little skill, training, or capital, with an army of drones to take up the work, and you can make tens of thousands of dollars on each card, then organized crime would seem like the perfect fit. Those groups are certainly interested in making a quick buck, and it’s hard to imagine their code of honor would frown on such an enterprise.

And yet it doesn’t happen, or hasn’t yet.

Perhaps for one of the reasons that I speculated above. Perhaps for others.

I’m certainly inclined to guess that a big reason is that it’s not as easy as it might seem to us. Travis has suggested as much, and I have no reason to doubt he’s wrong.

You know best. i must be wrong about the extent of it, you've convinced me. I'll just have to discard everything I've learned and heard from all my sources for decades now, damn. Not. PS you seem to be trying to convince yourself that most of your high grade cards are OK. If you feel safe, great.

I’m really not sure what I believe. Just trying to make a little sense of it through the economic lens. Haven’t quite been able to square the circle just yet. And maybe we never will.

Do what suits you, I know what I know, facts are facts. Even if it were hard, and most of it isn't, think how many cards even a single person could alter if that was his sole occupation for, say, three decades. You do the math, then multiply it by all the card doctors out there, and then add in all the ones doing routine stuff. It adds up.

Cool cool.

I’m just trying to better understand the facts.

I promise I still despise the concept of card doctors, and I sincerely hope nothing in my collection is doctored.

I hope so too.