Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric72
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
SGC has been scanning cards for a few years now. From what I understand, PSA has also begun to do this.
With time, that stockpile of digital images will grow. Additionally, technology will advance. The "digital card fingerprint" will either become reality or become easier to utilize.
At some point in the future, a grading company will see a before and after pair of images and say, "look, that's trimmed. This works, let's use it." Things should naturally pick up momentum from there.
I'm sure some will think, "the TPGs will never do this, because..." If business was static, that might be valid. It's not, though. Business and the pursuit of profit is a dynamic animal. If there's an opportunity to monetize this, someone will.
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Eric,
I know TPGs will scan and keep images for their own records, and more likely than not to protect their own arses, should someone come back and try to make a claim against them. But I'm not sure they take as magnified and high resolution enough images to be able to truly detect and be able to match photo "fingerprints" on that such level. And as I mentioned earlier, everyone in the hobby would need to help create and fully/freely share such a database with everyone else in the hobby for this to have any chance to work.
For example, a card doctor buys an SGC graded card off Ebay, and then does his/her magic, they just make sure they then submit the card to PSA or CSG, who likely won't have an already scanned image to check against. This would have only worked to detect the alteration if when SGC had originally graded the card they had also taken a highly magnified/high-res scan, and then uploaded it to some database that all the other TPGs could (and actually did) access and use to see if there was a "fingerprint" photo match for the submission to make sure it hadn't changed or been altered from the last time it had been graded and scanned by a TPG. This would require all the TPGs to work together, and for someone to take on the responsibility to keep and maintain/update this database, as well bearing the cost to do so. The TPGs are not going to cooperate and work together, and who in their right mind would ever take on such a database, unless they could somehow make money off of it? The card doctors are anything but dumb. They just make sure in the current way things are done to not resubmit a card to a TPG that may have already graded it. And once a card has been doctored/altered, I sincerely doubt it would get picked by another card doctor as a good candidate for further alterations/improvements. So, the card doctors only have to get their work by a TPG just one time for them to succeed. They're not going to keeping altering and resubmitting the same card over and over again. The only way these alterations are discovered then will be the same as it is now. Some third-party, like the BODA guys, has to take it upon themselves to go looking to find and then match what they think are likely to be before and after images of the same card. Unfortunately, that is often too little, too late, and the damage has already been done.