Some folks at PSA should be fired

[f2tornado]

They're wrecking my cards going into the slabs and the QA folks aren't catching it. Total joke for the amount of money they're getting.

This Emmitt Smith card now has a trashed corner. I certainly didn't send it that way and there's maybe a 0.000001% chance PSA would grade it mint showing up that way.





Same with this Favre rookie...





Sadly, this Jordan was essentially pristine when I sent it, however PSA trashed the upper right corner. Sure, I miss hard to notice defects once in a while but there's no way in heck I missed this. The photos don't do justice for how badly the corner is tweaked.




Stuff happens but own up to it. Assembly FAIL. QA FAIL.

[49erRCCollector]

That sucks. I’m taking a break from PSA for similar but different reasons. The company internally is just too chaotic to trust at the moment.

[CaptSpaulding]

Complete mess over there. It feels like there is zero leadership or management overseeing anything there presently. Sorry to the OP for the damaged cards. I would be pretty upset.

[Blazed]

The problem is there moving too fast. It's not about quality control anymore, now it's about "how many cards can we grade per hour/day/week/month". It's a money grab at this point.

And the steps the card goes through that you can follow along with, it reminds me of Dominos when they had that app to track your pizza going in the oven to your door. It was all bs, Dominos finally admitted it was just for "fun" and I'd be willing to bet the card tracker on PSA is the same.

[oddstuff]

Probably not much consolation but if you have social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) accounts, post/tag these pics to PSA. At the minimum you'll hear from others who have similar experiences and you may get the ear of one of their communication managers. They need to stop wrecking people's personal collections.

[imbluestreak23]

I've seen quite a few of these in the orders I've sent in recently. I've been too lazy to do the before/after comparisons and honestly some of the recent orders I don't even remember if/when I got raw on camera with how screwed up things have been, but I feel like I get things back and it's kind of the same. I'm like, why did I send this in, I would have caught this unless I was just using really bad lighting.

[alphaomegas]

Most of psa graders don’t even look at cards and just puts 9 on everything and if it’s a 10 like your card they had to damage it so to hide they’re incompetent.

Done with psa till they grade better to much money for shittty grades. Whatever happen to eye appeal psa 10.

[jetcollectibles]

I just had two tcg cards grade 8's that I pulled myself from a new set so was the only person to handle them. They are both very easy grades with pops 46/50 10's and 41/44 10's... Both are now the only 8's. I've graded with PSA a lot, so I feel pretty confident what to expect. I'm eager to get them in hand and see if something happened to them while in their care as well.... I also have three cards currently there for CRC requests getting recased for a plastic shaving, crumb/booger, and small opaque square on the front of a case. Q/A has really gone down lately.

[rohara99]

I have a psa 9 with the exact same corner. Graded recently. Corner is totally trashed.

[NatsSBR]

I have been convinced since I got my last order that there's some point before R&ID when there isn't video oversight and that this is where the cards are being damaged. This does make me wonder. Have you reached out about a damage claim?

And when I say it was my last order, I mean my LAST order until I have some confidence that they're running things properly, or until prices fall enough that I'm willing to risk a small number of junk gem candidates on a test run. I will be taking high-res scans before they go into the card savers and again with them in the card savers.

[giovipks]

I’ve had similar issues. Cards are just randomly getting 5,6 and 7. I’m not perfect with my eye but I wipe carefully every card, in great lighting while using a loupe with a light on it to see anything I can’t see with my naked eye. To get these grades is absurd. There isn’t consistency over there anymore and I’ve graded thousands of cards in the past year alone!

For the first time I’m considering bgs because I would like to know where they are citing some of these imperfections that honestly don’t exist.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[CardFarmer]

Originally Posted by giovipks

I’ve had similar issues. Cards are just randomly getting 5,6 and 7. I’m not perfect with my eye but I wipe carefully every card, in great lighting while using a loupe with a light on it to see anything I can’t see with my naked eye. To get these grades is absurd. There isn’t consistency over there anymore and I’ve graded thousands of cards in the past year alone!

For the first time I’m considering bgs because I would like to know where they are citing some of these imperfections that honestly don’t exist.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

My last order (the $18 bulk) had absurd grades for a different reason. I sent in some vintage cards, one of which was very clearly altered (coloring in the center of the card) that I wanted to have slabbed as 'authentic'. They straight out graded it. No qualifier, no altered tag, just as if it were normal. I don't know how they could have possibly missed it unless they didn't even look at the card at all and only fixated on corners/edges.

I also got the standard 1982 TT Ripken overgrading that I've had now three orders in a row.

[CheapThief]

Originally Posted by jetcollectibles

I just had two tcg cards grade 8's that I pulled myself from a new set so was the only person to handle them. They are both very easy grades with pops 46/50 10's and 41/44 10's... Both are now the only 8's. I've graded with PSA a lot, so I feel pretty confident what to expect. I'm eager to get them in hand and see if something happened to them while in their care as well.... I also have three cards currently there for CRC requests getting recased for a plastic shaving, crumb/booger, and small opaque square on the front of a case. Q/A has really gone down lately.

Ha- this is a riot; in fact, it might be the first 100+ post I've ever seen on the Internet that I could have written word for word.

I, too, just had a small(ish) TCG order graded with nothing but easy 10s in it, and also got exactly two WTF 8s. Can't wait to see what the deal is there; I'd guess 'damaged corners', but you have to really work to damage the corner on a TCG card so I guess we'll see what shows up. Maybe some faint scratching on the back? An edge nick that I thought was part of the card cut? We'll know soon.

[Beavers98]

But But But, PSA is so awesome...

Fanboys have to be in soon. Something like "these issues are everywhere, if you don't like money don't grade with them".

OP, Sorry your cards were damaged. That sucks.

[rohara99]

My recent PSA 9 Jagr with a fully bent corner.... either PSA 9's can have bent corners or it was damaged post grading. I noticed is 2 seconds after opening the package, it looks terrible in video(these are video screen caps).

[f2tornado]

I put in two support tickets last night. One for a few label corrections and the other regarding the damaged cards from first post. The CSR got me a label pretty quick for the corrections. Still waiting for info on the damaged cards. I'm guessing they won't do anything about the Jordan since its graded correctly for the damage they did but never hurts to try since it was in the same order as the Favre. I'm near certain they're gonna want the other two cards out of circulation as they're a 6 at best in 9 clothes.

I just find it hard to believe someone at PSA didn't know these were damaged at some point during the process. I work in Quality Assurance and we're not perfect, but it's rare we miss the obvious stuff. Stuff happens but it burns me there's a potential culture of fear over there where someone felt the need to let these slide.

[atk825]

PSA doesn't care. And customers clearly don't care because PSA for some reason sells for more than anyone else, despite a clear reason for it being the case.

[towerymt]

Originally Posted by Blazed

It's a money grab at this point.

It's a business, not a charity, not a hobby, but a business. Increased throughput increases revenue. If they get too sloppy, they lose business. But that seems unlikely to hurt them for quite a while given the current demand, even in a 'down market'. I wouldn't look for these issues to immediately change.

This is a good reminder to be aggressive with your declared values. Expect the worst, now that you know what could happen to your cards at PSA.

I would want the declared value paid out / credited for those cards that they damaged. Hopefully you declare expected value of the card for the expected grade, meaning replacement cost of a mint or better card, not just raw price of the card for some random copy off ebay. I was putting $25ea on Bo Bichette Topps rookies when they were $3-5ea raw....because it was at least a 5:1 ratio of total cards to grade-worthy cards. I had just over 100 of them and only 18 were worth grading.

[Brwdot]

Grading accuracy with PSA is at the all time lowest it's been.

A few years ago you could send in 50 cards and go 50 for 50 on gems if they were deserving.

Then shortly after, you would send in 50 cards and be lucky to get half gems as they were pop controlling everything.

Now, you can send in 50 cards and can never go 50 for 50, but you can get a lenient grader who will do 40-45 of 50, but will still just give you 9s because they can't give you all GEMs... and you will also get graders who will pop control you.

Basically, PSA went from giving cards grades that they deserved without care about giving out all GEMs or all 9s... to a company that GEM controls both with their "fair" graders and their pop control graders.

Now you have them straight up damaging cards which never was a thing. Really sloppy stuff going on there.

[mc1]

Originally Posted by Brwdot

Grading accuracy with PSA is at the all time lowest it's been.

A few years ago you could send in 50 cards and go 50 for 50 on gems if they were deserving.

Then shortly after, you would send in 50 cards and be lucky to get half gems as they were pop controlling everything.

Now, you can send in 50 cards and can never go 50 for 50, but you can get a lenient grader who will do 40-45 of 50, but will still just give you 9s because they can't give you all GEMs... and you will also get graders who will pop control you.

Basically, PSA went from giving cards grades that they deserved without care about giving out all GEMs or all 9s... to a company that GEM controls both with their "fair" graders and their pop control graders.

Now you have them straight up damaging cards which never was a thing. Really sloppy stuff going on there.

Even if you send gem worthy cards theyll likely damage your cards. Even if you get 90% gems the QA jerks will give you 9s on half of them at stage 1.

[gododgersfan]

They have hired so many people and add turnover and the end result is sloopy grading and quality control at all stages.

[LedZeppelin]

This is all concerning to me. I’ve seen some people post recently graded 10s that have me wondering how they graded so high. I see those and think my recent submission should have no problems if those passed through. Then I hear stories and see cases where the exact opposite is happening on orders where the cards appear to be obviously under graded or damaged. If I end up having a bad experience like some on here I will have no trouble giving my future business to SGC. I’m really more concerned about accuracy and consistency in grading than ROI since these cards are for my PC. Maybe I should have just sent to SGC in the first place. We shall see.

[MJGOAT23]

Add me to the list of cards that were damaged at PSA. Was a handful, and all with bent corners. Been waiting since June/July for resolution. Sent all kinds of photos then they needed the cards returned to them for additional inspection. Been silent since with token replies like uhhhh, yeah, we have a lot of volume, thanks for your patience. Serisouly hoping my next 2 orders of 76 + 21 cards do not suffer this way

[k13]

Somehow my buddy got a 80% gem rate on a 150 card order and I never found his eye to be that great with looking over cards.

Go figure.

[jetcollectibles]

Originally Posted by k13

Somehow my buddy got a 80% gem rate on a 150 card order and I never found his eye to be that great with looking over cards.

Go figure.

I complained above about several low grades on my last order, but have very much found this also to be true. I have had several cards in recent orders grade higher than expected, and have recently noticed more 10's graded with easily noticeable flaws on eBay that would normally have been dinged a grade or two.