Former PSA employee AMA on reddit

[steve B]

Referring to a comment about suspecting something based on the source..

Originally Posted by samosa4u

Yeah, that's a bit silly. Imagine having your ten-thousand dollar card posted up there, and yet they're not sure what was done on it. Now lots of people don't want to touch it ... gee thanks, guys.

NO, it's just sensible. If great granddad bought rare stamps from Spiro brothers or Fournier or Sperati.... Yeah, there's an excellent chance most of them are fake.
Or US covers from John Fox, who also sold real ones.

If a card was submitted by a prolific trimmer/recolorer? Again, odds are it's fake.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by steve B

If a card was submitted by a prolific trimmer/recolorer? Again, odds are it's fake.

By "fake", I take it you mean "altered"? Because I haven't seen any of these cards submitted by prolific trimmers/Van Goghs being called out as counterfeits by BODA. Also, I'm sure they submit plenty of cards that don't "need" altering. Just because they trimmed card A doesn't mean they also trimmed cards B through Z, particularly when BODA has scans of all those cards and "can't find any evidence of alterations" but posts it anyhow just because of semi-adjacent serial numbers. Also worth noting is that the trimmers are probably trying to sneak in their trimmed cards, surrounding them with non-altered cards in hopes that the trimmed one goes through undetected. I doubt there are very many of them who are truly just cutting up 100 cards and putting all 100 into one submission. That would be such a red flag and would greatly increase the probability of their entire order getting rejected and the submitter being banned. I would bet that the majority of cards submitted even by the Van Goghs and the cutters probably haven't been altered.

I get why they push the narrative though. These guys are spending countless hours every day trying to hunt down these "criminals", yet bearing no fruit despite devoting years of their lives to this. Meanwhile, the FBI (actual detectives) clearly couldn't care less about it. It must be extremely deflating. So they feel like they need to post something for their efforts. Can't allow an honest good day's work to go to waste, so here's a non-altered card for you! Who knows, it might be altered and we just can't tell lol. They're grasping at straws. It's not a good look. They're crying wolf.

Also, their method of tying sales to particular individuals is flawed. Saying they know a card was purchased by Moser because the buyer ID is 'm***1' (or whatever it is) somehow proves it is beyond laughable. There are countless 'm***1' usernames buying cards on eBay; literally thousands of them. Not to mention the fact that the username 'garymoser123' would have 132 different permutations that eBay uses at random for their purchases (12 Permute 2 = 132). They purchase a card and it shows as 'm***1' today, but it's 'g***e' tomorrow and '2***y' the next day. Don't believe me? Go to eBay, log out, and then look up your own eBay purchases and see what it lists you as. You'll have a different masked buyer ID for each one.

My favorite posts in those threads are the ones where BODA posts pics of a card that is accompanied by the "I couldn't detect alterations on this card, but the serial number is only 37 away from this other one that was trimmed, so something has probably been done to it. Here it is. I'm posting it for reference." Then the next 5 pages of comments are just pure gold.

• "You can see the top edge was trimmed! Just look at it!"

• "Oh wow, ya, they MURDERED that left edge! See that?"

• "Look at the right edge, I think they took a dental tool to the right edge!"

• "That bottom edge looks off. Something isn't right with that. I think they sanded it."

• "Look at the bottom right corner, that's a rebuilt corner. I know one when I see one!"

• "No, it's the top right corner. See the angle on it? They cut the entire corner off and gave it a new corner, then trimmed it and shaved it down!"

• "Look at the red background, that's supposed to be orange. They definitely recolored this card!"

• "Something looks off with the font. I think they recolored the name too."

It's absolutely hilarious. These guys have no clue what they're looking at. Every aspect of every card now looks altered/fake to the entire army of BODA's fanboys. But hand them a stack of raw cards, all of which were rejected by PSA or SGC because of alterations, and they think they're holding pure gold because, hey, "not slabbed = not altered" lol. Some of this stuff is pure comedy gold.

[steve B]

My comments in red.

Originally Posted by Snowman

By "fake", I take it you mean "altered"? Because I haven't seen any of these cards submitted by prolific trimmers/Van Goghs being called out as counterfeits by BODA.
Fair enough, I should have said altered. Although in my other hobbies an original item combined with a fake element is considered fake.

Also, I'm sure they submit plenty of cards that don't "need" altering. Just because they trimmed card A doesn't mean they also trimmed cards B through Z, particularly when BODA has scans of all those cards and "can't find any evidence of alterations" but posts it anyhow just because of semi-adjacent serial numbers. Also worth noting is that the trimmers are probably trying to sneak in their trimmed cards, surrounding them with non-altered cards in hopes that the trimmed one goes through undetected. I doubt there are very many of them who are truly just cutting up 100 cards and putting all 100 into one submission. That would be such a red flag and would greatly increase the probability of their entire order getting rejected and the submitter being banned. I would bet that the majority of cards submitted even by the Van Goghs and the cutters probably haven't been altered.

If I had any way of proving it, I'd take that bet. While it's a practice of some alterers in other fields, many also exclusively alter or produce outright fakes with no real/unaltered items. Some were good enough to fool experts for years.
While the PSA subs aren't accessible as the old SGC ones were, if you see a block of numbers that are for example all pokemon, followed by a block of numbers that are all sportscards and mostly vintage, then the next block is all modern cards it's fairly certain that those blocks are individual submissions. Some of the ones identified had about a 10% rejection rate, and also had many cards that were clearly altered based on the before and after scans collected. The paper fibers are as good as a finger print, possibly better as they're easier to interpret.

I get why they push the narrative though. These guys are spending countless hours every day trying to hunt down these "criminals", yet bearing no fruit despite devoting years of their lives to this. Meanwhile, the FBI (actual detectives) clearly couldn't care less about it. It must be extremely deflating. So they feel like they need to post something for their efforts. Can't allow an honest good day's work to go to waste, so here's a non-altered card for you! Who knows, it might be altered and we just can't tell lol. They're grasping at straws. It's not a good look. They're crying wolf.

Some of the more recent ones have seemed like very weak IDs to me. Many of the older ones were very certain. I can't say what motivates someone to spend so much time on finding those things, but it's probably similar to a "census" some people do of other less than common collectibles. I've spent a bunch of time on my own hobby projects, odd varieties, a spreadsheet of 48 Leaf images showing the different versions etc. And an image archive of items in one of my particular specialties. So I won't make fun of them for their efforts.

Also, their method of tying sales to particular individuals is flawed. Saying they know a card was purchased by Moser because the buyer ID is 'm***1' (or whatever it is) somehow proves it is beyond laughable. There are countless 'm***1' usernames buying cards on eBay; literally thousands of them. Not to mention the fact that the username 'garymoser123' would have 132 different permutations that eBay uses at random for their purchases (12 Permute 2 = 132). They purchase a card and it shows as 'm***1' today, but it's 'g***e' tomorrow and '2***y' the next day. Don't believe me? Go to eBay, log out, and then look up your own eBay purchases and see what it lists you as. You'll have a different masked buyer ID for each one.

I wasn't aware of that. I haven't bought from Ebay for a couple years, so I don't really have anything to check with. I wonder if it's different for each purchase, or only each session?

My favorite posts in those threads are the ones where BODA posts pics of a card that is accompanied by the "I couldn't detect alterations on this card, but the serial number is only 37 away from this other one that was trimmed, so something has probably been done to it. Here it is. I'm posting it for reference." Then the next 5 pages of comments are just pure gold.

• "You can see the top edge was trimmed! Just look at it!"

• "Oh wow, ya, they MURDERED that left edge! See that?"

• "Look at the right edge, I think they took a dental tool to the right edge!"

• "That bottom edge looks off. Something isn't right with that. I think they sanded it."

• "Look at the bottom right corner, that's a rebuilt corner. I know one when I see one!"

• "No, it's the top right corner. See the angle on it? They cut the entire corner off and gave it a new corner, then trimmed it and shaved it down!"

• "Look at the red background, that's supposed to be orange. They definitely recolored this card!"

• "Something looks off with the font. I think they recolored the name too."

It's absolutely hilarious. These guys have no clue what they're looking at. Every aspect of every card now looks altered/fake to the entire army of BODA's fanboys. But hand them a stack of raw cards, all of which were rejected by PSA or SGC because of alterations, and they think they're holding pure gold because, hey, "not slabbed = not altered" lol. Some of this stuff is pure comedy gold.

We see the same thing here. But I'd have to give the nod to the track record of some members, both here and on BO, which I don't follow much.

I still maintain that for some people PSA gets it wrong nearly every time. And their overall record is well beyond the realm of simple mistakes. I fix and make stuff for work, and the mistakes I make each year are very few. Probably under 5 a year, and the ones that get by me to the customer is maybe one every 2-3 years. I'm not just talking about a grader missing a problem and getting a grade wrong, but missing alterations etc which is exactly what their service is advertised as catching.