New PSA Terms & Conditions: Comp. Damages and Injunctive Relief for Card Doctoring
 

PSA updated their Terms & Conditions last week to include the following language regarding card doctoring:

‘12. Doctored and Inauthentic Items; Fraud Prevention and Investigation.

(a) You represent and warrant that any item submitted for any PSA Grading Service is genuine and you have no knowledge and no reasonable basis to believe that the item is a “Doctored” item. You affirm your obligations with respect to Doctored items set forth in these Terms. For purposes of these Terms, “Doctor,” “Doctored” or “Doctoring” means the alteration of the appearance of an item by things such as, but not limited to, trimming, re-coloring, bleaching, power erasing, cleaning, waxing, re-backing or any other form of restoration used to enhance the appearance, condition or content of an item.

(b) You agree that you will not Doctor items or participate in any way in Doctoring items or submitting any items to PSA for grading which you know or have reason to believe have been Doctored in any way, and acknowledge that the determination as to whether an item should be authenticated or graded shall be made solely by PSA in accordance with its standards. You acknowledge that detecting Doctored items is very difficult. You acknowledge that PSA will not authenticate or grade items which, in the judgment of PSA, bear evidence of Doctoring. However, because the determination by PSA to reject such Doctored items will require a review by PSA’s personnel, you will be required to remit, as set forth herein, the standard fee for any such Doctored items that are submitted to PSA. You acknowledge that Doctoring is wrongful and inappropriate activity which is harmful to PSA, and all of your obligations in this Section 12 shall survive termination of these PSA Terms.

…

(d) You agree that PSA would suffer irreparable damages if you were to engage in Doctoring of any item and that PSA is entitled to not only compensatory damages but also preliminary and final injunctive relief for any breach of your obligation not to Doctor items or to submit Doctored items to PSA in violation of your obligations hereunder.’

https://www.psacard.com/termsandconditions

So all cleaning (water and a q tip etc..) is now doctoring? And I am supposed to say that in order to submit to them it is wrong and I won't do it. Nice.

This reads to me like they are no longer going to encapsulate trimmed cards at all anymore, which would include ones like this:

https://bid.robertedwardauctions.com/bids/bidplace?itemid=188543

I’m sure this is aimed at the marketed card cleaning solution companies that openly brag online, with pictures and video, about bumping 3 or 4 grades with PSA.

Kurt's Card Care or whatever it's called, the signature product of the "bro" era of card collecting. Facial hair, backwards ball cap, t shirt, multiple devices, social media accounts and apps, and some Kurt's to make your shiny into 10s. This ain't your father's hobby no more and for those of you over a certain age like me, it ain't yours either.

If only PSA actually took card doctoring more seriously and didn't just pay lip service.

You would think with some of the high end altered cards they are paying out big money on they would start taking it WAY more seriously. From reading their new terms and conditions it seemed like they might go after the submitter or is that just my uneducated take.

CU sued some coin dealers years ago for submitting doctored coins. You would think it would be a bad PR move, acknowledging they had been fooled.

Opinions vary greatly but for me it would be a great PR move. As a collector it would make me want to use them rather than those that do nothing to the scammers.

On the coin side I was recently watching videos and several coin guys bragged about sending in cleaned coins. Very similar to the card bro videos.

Cleaned coins is a nuanced subject. It would take a Talmudic scholar to decipher PCGS' rules on what is and is not kosher.

I joked about this comment on blowout. I'll just boldface it here. PSA is admitting that they can't detect most card doctoring.

Joked or stated a fact? :rolleyes:

Wonder if ‘52 Robinson PSA 02023137 That went from a PSA 8 to
PSA authentic played a small part ?
https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=353161

I find the fact that PSA has a guarantee to begin with absolutely baffling. Someone important at Collectors is either remarkably ignorant about the true extent to which cards in their holders are "doctored" or they're incapable of thinking this through to the finish line. There's a reason SGC quietly got rid of their guarantee despite it being literally in the name. PSA will either have to change their stance on card doctoring or they will have to abandon their guarantee, because they can't have both without going belly up.

Oh please Travis. They've been in business, with the same guarantee, for 33 years. They aren't going belly up and they aren't going anywhere. They just say no and limit their liability. The graders stand behind the grade. Before and after photos are not evidence. Whatever it takes. Ask A.J. Very few people are going to sue them. I promise you they have thought this through, if nothing else all these dire predictions were raised countless times during the "scandal." Joe Orlando was not stupid. Nat Turner is not stupid. Their investors are not stupid.

And you now have a growing population of the hobby who does not give any weight to a card being altered or possibly being altered because you still need to be able to prove it, even if not in a court of law.

Anyway, most collectors almost appreciate it, it seems, because without that work having been done on that card, it would not have been available to them to buy.

CU was a public company for decades. They are now owned by very sophisticated and successful people. The notion that they don't understand the risk of their own warranty is not plausible.

According to their terms and conditions can't they just deactivate the cert # and tell the owner to pound sand?

I fixed your post.

These guys don't even know that their own cards are doctored lol. You think they have their finger on the pulse of the extent to which the entire high end vintage market has been doctored?

It is not just high end vintage that is at risk to being altered but any card in any grade where taking the time to fix it yields a justifiable profit to the fixer.

Yes, I think they know. How could they not? As you well know, it's a new world and many collectors don't really care. For 33 years they've controlled their warranty exposure, I see no reason that is going to change.

They've managed their warranty exposure by not honoring it in many cases and by being incompetent in others though.

Right, but the point is it's entirely within their control/discretion. "The graders stand behind the grade." Now what you gonna do, sue? Good luck with that. As the old intro to the Outer Limits went, we control the horizontal, we control the vertical.

Their business model seems to be based on the age old strategem of fooling most of the people most of the time. Witness all the talk on this board about whether it's worthwhile (monetarily speaking) to submit/re-submit a card to PSA/SGC.

:(

The questions whether they can authenticate/grade and whether the cards sell are entirely independent at this point. It is self-evidently worth it to submit nearly any valuable card.

Scout's honor, it aint been doctored... :D

That they cannot authenticate/grade is also self-evident. If they could they wouldn't be so desperately trying to divorce themselves from legal liability.

;)

How are they desperate? If they were desperate they would just trash the guarantee, like SGC did.

Seems less like desperation and more like either window dressing, or else trying to return liability to submitters who are either card doctors or are in cahoots with card doctors.

I'd say the latter. Risk management is part of what I do to for my daily bread. A good part of it is mitigation of liability. I've negotiated a lot of contracts (not a lawyer, FWIW) and I cannot think of a single one where the final issue wasn't either indemnities or the limitation of liability.

Ok, would one of you buyers of opinions explain 12(a) to me, isn't that what you guys are paying them to determine?

Their behaviour neatly summarized below sure fits my understanding of "desperately trying to divorce themselves from legal liability":

Yes, PSA, the dominant market player by far, fabulously successful, no foreseeable competition, like it or not the industry standard, is desperate. You know best, I'm sure.

That isn't desperation. That is just good business.

I would not call it desperation, but the new terms are pretty funny in the admittance that they have a hard time detecting doctored items and that they contradict the claims I have heard here over and over again that some kinds of alteration and cleaning are totally fine with PSA that are included here now.

Why people will pay huge multipliers more for a card that has been signed off on by this incompetent firm will never make any logical sense. The authority need not be competent, there just must be an authority, and even if people know that authority is incompetent, they will continue to buy in and participate on account of that appeal.

That's the genius of it. The flip has become the commodity. And in a world where the overwhelming majority of sales are now not in person, all the more power it's taken on.

It's certainly genius. They have built a customer base that is willing to overlook any and all incompetence and is completely fine with their inability to do their basic job, at best. Not many companies have a customer base that expects so little. Difficult to fault them for taking advantage of it. Why their customers do not believe PSA should be competent and keep throwing piles of extra money at cards that bear their approval is where it makes no sense. Taking advantage of this is in PSA's interest, and making money is the entire point for everyone. But almost everyone appears to certainly be aware this all rests on a bedrock of bullshit and these opinions they are throwing cash at are often demonstrably false. If logic or truth ever enters the equation or people's brains, and they question how wise this is and stop, the entire thing collapses.

I think the "scandal" was a pretty good test and it passed with flying colors and is stronger than ever. Think John Barleycorn Must Die. He emerged stronger than ever.

Public or group belief systems that fly in the face of ascertainable facts are usually unstoppable and stronger than ever, until they hit that wall where it crumbles, which is often not the hardest wall that's ever conflicted with the idea. It's not usually a slow decline as people clue in that the belief is not true or real, and most of them know it well before it becomes unsustainable. People in the group usually stay strong for as long as they think everyone else in the group is staying in. Facts do tend to win out in the end of most things. We shall see if the bullshit of card 'collectors' are strong enough to last forever. I would not be shocked at all if they are and this charade continues for decades, in different guises certainly, but the same central charade.

They should just start with a minimum size card requirement. I know what comes next from this board: "many cards are undersized and that wouldn't be fair for those cards". True, but how many undersized cards are there overall, especially if they have razor sharp corners. Take the following challenge - get a series of the same card and stack them neatly. How many actually deviate from the typical size? Oh yeah, a lot of people can't do that but they can stack the slabs and those are pretty much all the same size.

Most people are right - this is a cry out by a company that offers a service that they are beginning to understand they cannot deliver on very well and they believe this will give them an avenue to take legal action against people that try to deceive them, intentionally.

There's an easy way to get around it. Have someone else submit the cards that is not aware the cards are doctored.

This is a joke.

Yep. In many areas of life people will just deny or ignore facts contrary to a belief system that works for them.

What's mentioned in post #38 and the previous post is true. How long can hobbyist turn a blind eye to all this crap. Investment type collectors will look the other way as long as possible. Question is, what is the ratio of hobbyist vs investment type collectors? I bet if a poll was run, most people would say they were "hobbyist" and not investors. :p

For the most part, IMO, the hobbyists are just as much a part of it.

I’m not a high end collector for a few reasons, one certainly being lack of funds! My casual outsider observation on high end cards is if they are worth a ton of money beat up because they are old, rare and have a great player on them or are a key part of a tough set, that makes sense to me. If they are worth a ton of money because they aren’t that rare generally but have particularly sharp corners, that seems a bit crazy. No offense to those that can afford them but sharp vintage cards scream exacto knife to me.

Can you please elaborate.

I think most hobbyists like the slabs as much as investors. Hobbyists sell when they want to raise funds for something else, and having a commoditized slab is a huge advantage. Many registry types I would call hobbyists too, not investors.

Well that makes at least two of us.

:p

But it is of course dangerous to generalize from one's own experience/perspective.

;)

Well one thing's for sure. If I woke up tomorrow morning and found a whole bunch of my cards somehow magically encased in slabs, I'd rid myself of the lot by putting them up for sale immediately. Put my whole collection in slabs, and I'd not only kiss all my cards goodbye by sending them off to an auction house, I'd kiss the hobby goodbye.

:(

Well said.

:cool:

Form a collecting perspective, hobbyist don't have much of a choice in the matter when it comes to purchasing cards. If you want something and it's slabbed, then that's the choice you get.

You nailed it. It commoditized the hobby which may not have been advantageous to hobbyists on a budget and it opened up the hobby to gross manipulation.

I'm sure a lot of hobbyist do like the slabs but it came with a cost.

Good business? Penning this type of doggerel?

Me I'd have to be driven beyond desperation to pen or even sanction such doggerel being posted in my name.

:eek:

Quite simply PSA's whole business model was based on providing buyers with a guaranty that the cards are as stated, i.e. the real thing. But they call into question their own competence/expertise with this attempt (whether you wan't to call it desperate or not) to limit their legal liability if and when they fail to detect that the card in question is the real thing. It's a very clear case of the emperor himself admitting he has no clothes.

They've thus undermined their whole business model. For what after all are customers paying if not some sort of guaranty?

:confused:

You don't seem to be very in touch with the current market. I guarantee (haha) you the vast majority of buyers don't even know about the guarantee and if they do they don't care. SGC took the G out of its name and nobody cared. BODA revealed that the extent of altered cards was much greater than most had previously thought, and PSA's business skyrocketed. The guarantee is NOT the foundation of their business model, if it ever was, those days are long long gone. This isn't the 1990s any more.