Late last year, a high-volume submitter known in hobby circles as “Cali-Cards” sent Professional Sports Authenticator a batch of 30 modern cards, including 2019 Panini Prizm Zion Williamson rookies and Pokémon Tag Team cards. Nearly all of them came back graded PSA 9. Instead of paying to resell them himself, he used PSA’s Direct Buyback Program, a service the company launched in November 2024 that lets submitters cash out at PSA’s own valuation. PSA paid him $35 a card.
Weeks later, he checked PSA’s public certification tracker out of habit. Eleven of the same cards had reappeared in the system, now graded PSA 10, a jump that can multiply a card’s resale value several times over.
The discovery spread through the hobby under the hashtag #PSAUp-Gate. Threads on Reddit’s r/sportscards and r/PokeGrading dissected the timeline for weeks, and card show organizers began suspending PSA submissions. Dealers Score More Points and Three Point publicly cut ties with the company, with Score More Points removing PSA branding from its shop entirely in favor of rival grader CGC, whose own ownership has drawn scrutiny in the hobby before.
The backlash exposed a structural conflict that had been sitting in plain sight. PSA sets the grade on a submitted card and, through its Direct Buyback Program, also sets the price it pays to acquire that same card before any potential reappraisal. Collectors Holdings, PSA’s parent company, described the incident as an isolated grading error caught during an internal review. Its chief executive, Nat Turner, characterized it differently in a string of replies to collectors online, at one point calling it a systematic failure.
PSA’s credibility problem did not end with the buyback program. A fraud report the company released in May found that some of the hobby’s most recognizable cards are counterfeited at striking rates. Of 181 submitted 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle cards, 112 came back fake, a rate above 60 percent. Michael Jordan’s 1984 Star #101 and 1986 Fleer cards showed counterfeit rates of roughly 25 percent. PSA said its human graders now work alongside AI imaging models trained on years of scanned card data, flagging trimmed edges and known forgery patterns before a card is ever certified.
Some products earn their standing simply by being the one players keep coming back to. Aviator at KTO Bet, a crash game, is a clear example, as it has become the most popular title in its category, drawing a steady base of players who return round after round. That kind of sustained demand isn’t manufactured, it reflects a game that has proven itself in practice, not just on paper.
Card grading offers no real equivalent. A PSA slab’s authenticity can only be confirmed by going back to PSA itself, the same company now facing a federal lawmaker’s call for antitrust scrutiny over its ownership of rival graders Beckett and SGC. No formal investigation has been opened. PSA continues to process roughly 19 million cards a year, and in February it raised its grading fees for the second time in five months while extending turnaround times along with them.
Collectors have not stopped submitting cards. Many have simply started spreading their trust more thinly, sending vintage pulls to competing graders and treating a PSA grade less as a final verdict and more as one opinion worth double-checking.
