PSA Response from President Steve Sloan

[benjulmag]

Originally Posted by Mark17

Thank you for your very thoughtful reply. I pretty much agree with you all the way down the list. Here are my thoughts to your comments:

1. Removing a foreign substance that causes paper loss... I am not sure how that is substantially different than handling my cards and creating a bit of paper loss from normal wear. It seems that your standard is that you can't do something that alters the card from its original state. Well, my cards had sharp corners in their original state, and now the corners show some fraying and rounding. Must I state to the TPG or buyer that I handled the cards a little, to account for their current non-mint condition?

2. "Unaltered by recognized grading standards." Are those standards universally accepted and codified in law somewhere? I'm being rhetorical - I think this is what is lacking in terms of being able to prosecute.

3. The problem with being able to do things to cards as long as you disclose what you did only goes one generation. Do I disclose what I did to the TPG and let them then grade the card (and now it is "officially" a 7 or 8 or whatever, after they take into consideration what I did) or do I disclose what I did to the buyer? Once the card has left my hands, there is no certainty the story of what I did will be recounted every subsequent time that card changes owners.

4. I don't think disclosure would be needed with cards that every collector knows were issued on the sides of boxes (cereal, jello, bubble gum pieces, cupcakes, etc.) What would the disclosure reveal? I cut these really cleanly? That would be self-evident.

5. I agree with the first part of what you said - Stephen Juskiewicz Inc. bought authentic cards from Topps and cut them with their blessing - but not with their equipment. As I mentioned in my post, looking at an 800 count box, the edges of the cards looked like glass, which is not how the edges of the cards in a Topps vending box look. They also paid much better attention to centering. In short, they did a superior job than Topps, which is why I suspect their cards were prime candidates for the top grades.

Your conclusion was good and I agree. But with all this gray area, I really wonder what the card doctors could be charged with, from a purely legal, prosecute-able standpoint. Not to get into a head-butting contest about who's elephant is bigger, but I think the biggest elephant in the room is that there might not be much of a legal leg for any prosecutor to stand on, even with all the evidence.

Again, in your order.

1. Worn corners are apparent and need no disclosure.

2. A successful fraud prosecution has nothing to do with whether the grading standards are codified in law.

3. If you are submitting it to a TPG, you disclose it to them. If the card is raw and you are selling it privately, you disclose that what a rational buyer would reasonably regard as material that otherwise the buyer would not reasonably be expected to know and from the circumstances reasonably would not expect to have been done to the card.

4. No argument.

5. Again with this issue, a murky area to some, but to me, I would be okay with it. The fact that this dealer did a better job cutting them, because he was an authorized subcontractor of Topps, would be analogous to different, say, tobacco factories cutting Piedmont brand t206s having better cutting processes. Despite that, those tobacco cards would all be properly regarded as factory cut.

Conclusion: The card doctors could properly be charged with fraud. Whether law enforcement wants to devote the resources to pursue this, that is another matter.