Grading Guarantees - Are They For Real???

[BobC]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

If there were no difference in the grading fees, then PSA and SGC would be inundated with thousands of fake T206 Wagners, Cobbs, Goudey Ruths, and '52 Mantles on a weekly basis and would waste countless hours labeling such cards "? Auth" and sending them back to people who said "Well, they told me I should have it graded" or scam artists hoping for a slim chance a grader would make a huge mistake.

As for the rest - yes, grading companies are biased, use subjectivity in judgement, and make many decisions on a daily basis which smack with conflict of interest or other questionable integrity issues. But we have paid them well for doing that for a generation at least now. The hobby was not perfect before grading, and despite the numerous hobby "ills" that grading was ostensibly designed to solve - it's certainly not perfect with them in the picture now. Cost of doing business. "Buy the card not the grade" people have already moved on in most cases, IMO.

What are you talking about? So TPGs get inundated by thousands of fake cards, which if they are the experts they claim to be, they quickly note and see they are fake, return them ungraded as such, and oh yes, keep the grading fees for all those fake cards as well. They still get paid for looking at all the fakes, so why would they care? What scares me more is the possibility that a TPG would go ahead and declare a fake as authentic, so the value goes up, and they can charge more fees for grading it as a result. If the TPGs are actually good at doing their job and determining fakes, the fraudsters and scammers would quickly quit wasting money trying to get fakes authenticated as real, and stop submitting so many obvious fakes to them for grading.

And yes, am well aware that the TPGs have taken over the industry and the "horses are out of the barn", so to speak, and people in the hobby itself will likely never get control of the grading standards back from the TPGs and be able to force them to use a single, consistent set of standards, be transparent and totally unbiased in what they do, and submit to ongoing independent review of their work. But if all that ever did happen, as part of the independent oversight and review process, a governing hobby body could also have the TPGs getting inundated by fakes from submitters make the names/identities of those that continually kept trying to get fakes authenticated made public, so the hobby community was fully aware of who these scammers and fraudsters are.

I fully agree with you on "buy the card, and not the holder", but Net54 I think has a much higher and experienced level of collector, at least in regard to pre-war/vintage cards, and we by no means represent or make up a majority of the collector community out there. As such, a lot of collectors probably aren't as savvy as many of the members on here are. Plus, I think there may be a lot more investors/flippers out there than actual collectors nowadays. They know a graded card almost always sells for more than a raw card, and certain TPG graded cards almost always seem to sell for more than other TPG comparably graded cards. And for them, it seems to be all about the holder as dealers/sellers/AHs rely on and push those graded cards with their online sales. Let's face it, the original start and subsequent growth/demand of graded cards was a lot in response to the advent of online selling and the fact that people, especially those newer to and not as experienced yet, didn't actually get to personally see and handle cards they had already paid for, until they actually got delivered to them. The idea of an independent, third-party grader/authenticator made the idea of mail order/remote/online selling more appealing to those buying blindly. It eased their fears of getting ripped off by scammers and crooks. The TPGs, AHs, and sellers/dealers have since taken the TPG grading concept and so ingrained it in our hobby, and elevated it to a seeming control of the hobby community, so it is not soon going away. And even though many like us here on Net54 still may not be so endeared to graded cards, we all realize the economic effect that grading has on card prices and values. And even if we intend to never sell our cards, we all know that a sudden financial crisis, or leaving them to family after we're gone, is probably best done by getting at least some of them graded first. The hobby has changed around us, whether we like it or not. And TPGs are at the heart of the start of that changing, and behind the push to where we are today.