THE MARKEL REPORT: Are Graded Baseball Cards Being “Juiced” (Aesthetically Enhanced)?

[WhenItWasAHobby]

There were several topics up for discussion since I last posted.

Leon wondered about several things. This may help:

1. Yes, the postal inspectors office in Dallas and Houston are both aware of what's been going on and in Dallas for quite awhile. An agent at the Houston office said they are backed up but have an interest in this case and may get to it in the near future.

2. Besides the postal inspectors, a criminal complaint was filed through the F.B.I.'s website to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) on July 31st. The Complaint Id is I0907311626469362.

3. Michael O'Keefe was contacted by one of the team members several months ago and was asked if he would publicize a civil case related to this issue and he said he would. As far as I know he hasn't seen this thread.


The other topic was PSA.

I'm not going to say anything good or bad about them right now. This is what I know. Susor had a long history of having a significant portion of his invoices rejected for trimming. We know this by checking his cert runs. By the way, a very invaluable thanks to the Network54 member who designed that program on Card Target. That saved us a lot of time. Someone did a calculation of his rejected for evidence of trimmings in 2007 and it was 38%. So in short, I don't have any reason to believe PSA was in bed with him.

One other thing. I talked to a PSA Customer Rep named Shane at the January 2008 Tri-Star in Houston for about 20 minutes. Shane was very nice and I warned him that I was convinced that someone was intentionally submitting altered cards to PSA. I explained Susor's MO to a tee without mentioning his name and give him a lot of circumstantial evidence. His response was in essence: "We always catch the bad cards, so if someone wants to throw his money away and try getting altered cards past us - go ahead." He also said that when an invoice goes over a certain percentage of trimmed cards, something like 30%, they call the submitter. I walked away shaking my head thinking they must have Susor's number on speed dial.

One other thing, shortly after that conversation, the PSA website would no longer show if a cert number was rejected for evidence of trimming to the public.