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Elliot WIWAG RESTITUTION GOING WELL
By Rocky Landsverk
Details of how John Slight and Craig Kreider of When It Was A Game executed their PSA graded-card fraud are slowly coming to the surface, while collectors are being treated to an unusually high success rate of restitution.
Slight and Kreider have pled guilty to busting open PSA holders and switching the cards to lesser-quality versions. They face sentencing this summer. The story, which broke in January, shook the foundation of the grading industry as a possible catastrophe if collectors believed WIWAG’s success in switching cards invalidated the entire card-grading premise. But, said PSA president Joe Orlando, “It has had virtually no effect on our business, in terms of submissions and authentications on a daily basis. ... Now that collectors have had a chance to reflect on it, collectors seemed to have the perspective that it’s not that the system didn’t work, it’s that it did work. They didn’t get away with this.”
Tim Fitzsimmons of the FBI confirmed that one of WIWAG’s schemes was to submit a great card to PSA to get a high grade, crack the holder and remove the card, put an inferior card into that holder and use a slab-sealer to close the holder again. They would then resubmit that great card to PSA to get another high grade and use that resulting holder to repeat the process. “They would get a 10 and submit it over and over again,” Fitzsimmons said. Orlando pointed out that repetitious submissions from WIWAG are being pulled from the PSA Population Report as they’re uncovered.
A key question for which there hasn’t been a specific answer given is how many of these WIWAG-switched cards are in circulation. Fitzsimmons said WIWAG/FBI records indicate hundreds of people have sent in cards to PSA for re-examination, but he didn’t have a count of how many cards in total have been sent in for re-evaluation, nor did he have a number for how many cards WIWAG actually switched. Orlando said PSA doesn’t know those numbers either, while WIWAG declined to comment for this story.
Restitution has been excellent because, Fitzsimmons said, many things fell into place: 1) WIWAG is financially stable, unusual for criminals who’ve been caught; 2) the prosecutors in this case did collectors a favor by making restitution part of the plea agreement, not the sentencing; and 3) the new electronic world of eBay offered better record-keeping than had been previously available to investigators.
Said Fitzsimmons, “There’s a lot more incentive for restitution before the sentencing than after. And eBay provides impeccable records, which allowed e-mails to go out to (the victims). With the sales going through eBay, their records are phenomenal and they were very helpful.”
Orlando said even though a previously announced deadline has passed, collectors can still call the FBI’s WIWAG hotline at 1-858-499-7952 to inquire about having their cards re-assessed by PSA to ensure the holders don’t contain WIWAG switches.
Many collectors expected there to be a followup announcement that PSA was changing its holders so something like this couldn’t happen again. Orlando said no, there’s no need to change the holder, because obviously it works. “We don’t feel that the holder is susceptible,” Orlando said. “The holders are intended to be tamper-evident, not tamper-proof. If the holders’ security systems didn’t work, we wouldn’t have been able to catch them.”
04-25-2003, 02:35 PM
WIWAG story from SCD
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