serial checks

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Posted By: Kevin Saucier

When looking at a very high-grade or a questionable card on an auction catalog, do you ever check the serial numbers both behind and in front (if possible)?

I usually go 10 forwards and 10 backwards and seem to find a good number of rejected cards at times. What is your experience? If you were to find, let's say a 25% rejection rate or more, would you still consider bidding?



Kevin Saucier

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Posted By: Marc S.

I usually don't look. I'm assuming from your e-mail that your experience is specifically with PSA, and not with SGC. That said, perhaps it would be a good/interesting data point, but I'm not sure how to develop actionable items out of it (other than to become paranoid and bit on a lot fewer cards). This is further mitigated, in my mind, by two factors:

A) I tend to think that higher-dollar, higher-grade cards often get submitted in smaller submissions, so there is a larger probability that there may not be ample surrounding certification numbers to provide a sufficient sample size.

B) Memory Lane has taught us that it is perhaps easy for some sellers / auctioneers to simply get the serial numbers on their PSA graded cards changed. If nothing else, this can completely invalidate any analysis along these lines.

Perhaps it's just blissful ignorance on my end. But I tend to trust a combination of my eyes/experience, augmented by the professional grader's stamp of approval.

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Posted By: Peter_Spaeth

I have done it. Most of the time nothing unusual comes up; occasionally you see a whole slew of rejections and have to wonder.

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Posted By: Jim VB

I'm not overly familiar with the procedures of the grading companies. Can you really check sequential numbers? I always assumed they had a system in place to prevent this.

When most companies number things for record keeping purposes, they use a mathematically generated "check digit" for the last number. This puts the second to last digit as the sequential one, but makes a random check impossible. Have the grading companies never figured this out?

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Posted By: Matt

SGC uses the first set of numbers as your invoice number and the 2nd set of numbers as the card order on that invoice. Due to this obvious numbering system, they also don't expose a way to check serial numbers, which almost defeats the purpose.

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Posted By: Peter_Spaeth

On PSA's website you can do a check of any cert. number. Submissions are given sequential cert. numbers, including rejected cards.

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Posted By: D.C. Markel

Yes, I've been doing this with eBay auctions off and on for at least 7 years. Part of the reason is just out of curiosity to see what else is on a person's invoice. Sometimes they will have multiples of the same card in the same grade, thus there is no point in going wild over the first one offered.

But on occasion I've come across several Gold Sellers who have a repeated history of getting a significant percentage of cards rejected for trimming. When it goes on and on for more than six months or even a year, you begin to realize it's just not some hapless schmuck who is continuously being victimized by obtaining bad cards from unscrupulous raw card sellers. In my opinion it's an exercise worth doing.

I wish some computer geek could make a computer program that could automatically generate invoice results over a 100 or 200 cert number range. That would be an invaluable service in my opinion.

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Posted By: Matt

Dan - I'd be happy to write such a program - how much would you be willing to pay for this "invaluable service"?

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Posted By: D.C. Markel

Matt - If you could do it - that's great. How much would I pay for it? I'm not sure. My concern is that PSA could change the cert verification system so that a code needs to be entered for each entry.

But rather than do it for the money, why not do for free and open it to the public and be the hero of the hobby? For instance, I knew years before the WIWAG scandal, that WIWAG had very significant trimmed card rejection rates by looking at the cert runs on their cards. As a result, I never bought cards from them and didn't have to go through the restitution process when that scandal became known. There's other dealers out there right now who fit the profile of high rejection rates. Why not let that be obvious to all collectors and force these unscrupulous dealers to be more accountable for their business practices?

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Posted By: Matt

Dan - if it was something that had value to me and I felt was worth me doing anyway, I probably wouldn't have a problem sharing it. However, I don't really have a need for it, and I've got other things to do with my time, so I'd need to be compensated.

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Posted By: D.C. Markel

OK what's your price?

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Posted By: Matt

let's discuss offline.

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Posted By: MVSNYC

when i first read this post, i thought, wow, you people have WAY too much time on your hands...but after a few responses on this thread, i can see the benefit of doing this...

overall, an interesting idea.

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Posted By: Tom Nieves

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Posted By: D.C. Markel

Tom,

By all means please enlighten me and the rest of the collecting community. I have a good idea who you "think" this dealer is.

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Posted By: MikeU

"When looking at a very high-grade or a questionable card on an auction catalog, do you ever check the serial numbers both behind and in front (if possible)?

I usually go 10 forwards and 10 backwards and seem to find a good number of rejected cards at times. What is your experience? If you were to find, let's say a 25% rejection rate or more, would you still consider bidding?"

Are you talking about Scott Susor's typical 50% rejection rate?

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Posted By: MikeU

"There's other dealers out there right now who fit the profile of high rejection rates. Why not let that be obvious to all collectors and force these unscrupulous dealers to be more accountable for their business practices?"

Dan,

Do you believe there is any responsibility whatsover on the grading company to blacklist repeated high trim rate submitters?

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Posted By: cmoking

"B) Memory Lane has taught us that it is perhaps easy for some sellers / auctioneers to simply get the serial numbers on their PSA graded cards changed. If nothing else, this can completely invalidate any analysis along these lines."

Its too bad Joe Orlando doesn't understand why his customers or potential customers (or past customers) were in an uproar over the changed cert numbers.

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Posted By: Frank Evanov

Yes, I have done it. Generally nothing much ever comes of it, but I would hesitate on bidding if a card was nestled in between a bunch of trim jobs.

Frank

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Posted By: Brian

I have searched certs more than a few times. I have avoided bidding on several questionable cards as a result. I find move value in other arrives, but avoiding trim submissions is nice.

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Posted By: Mike

So I took a couple hours to make it.

http://www.cardtarget.com/cgi-bin/psa_cert.cgi

It is limited to 10 cards on each side of the input number. If we allowed much more than that it would really bog down our server (and I assume PSA's server too). If this is a popular feature I can make it work in different ways or provide more information over a broader range of cert numbers.

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Posted By: MikeU

"So I took a couple hours to make it.

http://www.cardtarget.com/cgi-bin/psa_cert.cgi

It is limited to 10 cards on each side of the input number. If we allowed much more than that it would really bog down our server (and I assume PSA's server too). If this is a popular feature I can make it work in different ways or provide more information over a broader range of cert numbers."

That is fantastic!

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Posted By: D. C. Markel

Awesome job Mike! I greatly appreciate it.

Dan

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Posted By: Jim VB

Mike,

As an admitted Luddite, I am easily impressed by those who handle technology so well. But this is incredible. This morning, I was unaware that PSA issued sequential numbers. Tonight, I'm checking out recent purchases.

Thank you.

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Posted By: quan

so now in order to buy any card $250+ i will need scans of card, as well as results of 25 +/- certs of surrounding cards and kevin's seal of approval!





i do check certs when applicable.

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Posted By: Marty

Great. Thank you Mike.

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Posted By: Larry

deleted

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Posted By: MVSNYC

mike- now that's cool! thanks...

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Posted By: Andrew S.

Yes, it appears to be only the second vintage card ever graded. That would have been back about 1991.

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Posted By: JK

I guess Matt just lost out on a payday.

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Posted By: Matt

It happens. I do software jobs for a living so all I can do is quote a fair price. I certainly don't land every job.

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Posted By: Wesley

Great job Matt. The cert check is quite a resource.

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Posted By: Matt

It's not mine - Mike did it.

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Posted By: Shane Leonard`

Mike, I really appreciate you doing this for all of us.(not to sound like Bruce) I have always checked the cards around the cert. number that I was interested in. I am thankful that PSA has a website that allows us to do this as well.


This is awesome.
Thanks,
Shane

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Posted By: sonny

Thanks for your kindness Mike. That is a very useful program.

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Posted By: Mike

I'm glad it's working well. I updated it this morning to cache some of the results so that if somebody searches for a cert that is already been searched for it will quickly remember the results rather than having to rebuild from the PSA website. That should help with the load on the server. A lot of you must have google toolbar installed because we'd see a query run and then a few minutes later see Googlebot run the same query and it was a lot of server load to run them two or more times.

We'll leave this as a free feature on our site forever, but we may make you sign in to use it pretty soon. Gotta prove those membership numbers you know... =)

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Posted By: Mike

That they need to get a cert check online. I don't think they realize the importance this is going to have in the future, not just for looking up a single certification number, but for automated programs and other things that will make the hobby easier.

Oh, and I found this one (well, one of you found it). I guess this is the kind that make you go Hmmmmm???

http://www.cardtarget.com/cgi-bin/psa_cert.cgi?certnum=04789136

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Posted By: Matt

I've spoken to SGC about it and they refuse to do it for "privacy reasons." Since their serial numbering system is based on invoice numbers, you would clearly be able to see all cards graded for that submitted on that invoice, and they fell that is information the submitted would rather keep private (perhaps exactly to avoid discoveries like we are making on the PSA site). I still told them I thought it would be a huge help to have online cert verification, but they didn't seem inclined to do anything about it.

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Posted By: PC

I ran two searches in the new program for high grade PSA cards being offered currently on eBay by a particular high volume seller, who always seems to have great material. The search results are very interesting, to say the least:

Here are the two cert nos. I searched:
04653835
08232476

I also searched randomly on eBay for PSA 7 T206s currently being auctioned, and ran the program on several cert nos. on cards currently being offered by another well known seller. The results were not as bad as the two above, but there were still one or two trims in the vicinity of two of the three card that I searched.

This is a great program. The results are truly damning. If I were sitting on a lot of PSA graded high value vintage, I'd be running searches on every single one.

Of course, when I get home from work I will run searches on my low grade PSA-graded stuff, and I have no doubt that some will turn up with trims in the vicinity. That will be disheartening, but then I didn't pay $2000+ for PSA 8 T206s (*phew*).

Edited to add a sincere "thanks" to Mike for creating the program -- very impressive work in such a short time period ***

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Posted By: Matt

PC - if those sellers were selling the cards that were found to be trimmed, unslabbed and without mentioning the trimming, then we would have them on something. As it is, do we know that they did the trimming? Perhaps they just bought a big lot of cards and some of them ended up being trimmed. The fact that they are NOT selling those trimmed cards at all actually shows me they have some scruples.

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Posted By: Mike

"Since their serial numbering system is based on invoice numbers, you would clearly be able to see all cards graded for that submitted on that invoice, and they fell that is information the submitted would rather keep private (perhaps exactly to avoid discoveries like we are making on the PSA site)."

Well, it's a good reason, but it's only because somebody in the past wasn't very forward thinking. It's time to change the system to take that "security risk" out of the equation. If PSA's cards are much easier to handle (barcode scanning, cert lookup), it's putting SGC at a disadvantage.

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Posted By: PC

Matt -- I agree, none of the search results necessarily means that a seller trimmed the cards directly. However, if you see enough rejections, across different issues and time periods (e.g., 1900s tobacco cards, 1930s/40s gum cards, etc.), certain conclusions could be drawn, if one were inclined to draw those conclusions.

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Posted By: Matt

08232596

Wow.

13 cards submitted, 0 slabbed.

I would hope PSA keeps records of submissions so that they have their eyes open the next time guys like this submit something. Then again, you hope they have their eyes open all the time...

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Posted By: cmoking

Matt, those may have been crossovers. M/G could be a minimum grade not met on a crossover from another company, and the others PSA may have rejected while in another company's holder for evidence of trimming. I don't know if that's damning to PSA or another company...or both. Not enough information.


Mike - cardtarget - great tool! Thanks for setting it up.

While I think its really interesting, I'm still not sure how to make any useful conclusions from this information. Let's say I hit up a cert of a 1933 Goudey PSA 7 card, and all 21 cards that show up are 1933 Goudeys. 17 of them are graded PSA 6 or 7, and the other 4 are rejected for Evidence of Trimming. What does that tell me about the 17 that were graded? It could very well be that PSA rejected the correct four and slabbed the correct 17. Even if the numbers were changed, say 11 graded and 10 rejected - why are people assuming that the 11 graded are not suspicious? If the grader rejected the other 10, maybe he was being too careful and rejected too many cards, so that may mean the 11 that were slabbed are definitely clean.

On the other hand, let's say someone submitted 21 T206s and all of them got PSA 7s. Does that mean all of them are definitly clean? Maybe the grader let some slide, maybe there was collusion going on (for the conspiracy theorists). Why are those 21 clean but the 15 not as clean if 6 were rejected?

I don't know the answer. I've yet to hear a good answer for that question. All I here is suspicions. Yes, I have suspicions too...but on the cert numbers and Grades alone from the database, I don't know what conclusions to draw.


I'm looking for ideas on how to make this information useful, other then just being suspcious. I know the cert information is useful in conjunction with knowing the submitter. But without knowing the submitter, I'm not as confident about the info.

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Posted By: jeffdrum

Eyes Wide Shut!