Hello, You certainly know the price of Pokémon cards continues to rise, only in the context of future sales we would need to convince our new buyers with higher prices. I would like to ask you to increase your purchase prices by 20% on your PCA and PSA cards. Obviously this request is not going to be made without compensation, so I can afford to pay you back once these sales have taken place. The interest for you and me being to resell our collections at their fairest price. In this context, I can offer you to organize upsells, that is to say to organize sales of your own cards in order to convince future buyers of their price. Obviously the sales will then be canceled but will continue to appear as successful sales and we will allow us to continue to convince our customers of the added value to come. I have already been able to come to an agreement with more than 50 people. Cordially.
Does that mean that the prices have been faked for years?
I´ve seen someone post the exact message on ig yesterday, seems like it´s one individual trying to up prices of competitors to sell his stuff quicker for the price he wants.
There´s no illuminati conspiracy behind all this, prices usually are what they are. Just some people trying to be smarter than they should be.
@bluelizardon
You’re not the first or last member who receives greedy requests like this, no chance you get any payments afterwards.
Keep listing & pricing your items like before, delete messages and ignore. That’s how I’d approach this situation.
This person is 100% lying here, but also this is just what Pokémon is like now, especially with vintage.
The PSA pause has been interesting because it’s slowed down vintage sales and made it harder for people to flip. Before people were feverishly buying ungraded cards to grade and flip, or midgrade cards to crack and regrade, or just buying hot cards in 8s and 9s and immediately relisting them for $500 more. A lot of the goldrush is predicated on people with lots of buy-in money buying and selling to each other and climbing the ladder up and up. But with grading through PSA on hiatus there’s fewer people buying for this express purpose, which has left a lot of people holding the bag on expensive cards that other would-be flippers aren’t buying.
I’m trying to buy a 1st Edition Neo Genesis Lugia for example, a card with ample stock but inflated prices. At auction, PSA 7s will sell for $1,000-$1,300. But people are still trying to sell their ungraded cards for $1,500 or more. PSA 8s have a bunch of live listings at $1,800, which you could buy right now, and a ton of listings that have been up since mid-February of people trying to sell them for $2,600. So there’s a lot of people holding, less people buying, and this growing anxiety about how to still get the most out of the cards people bought as “fast money.”
There are lots of people who have a vested interest in prices going up and up. Lots of people bought cards thinking they could instantly sell them for hundreds more dollars and aren’t budging until they do. But people also aren’t buying them for that price, so I’m not surprised some weirdo is getting desperate and trying to convince other sellers to price fix.
Rounded to the nearest whole number percent, there is a 0% chance that seller has 50 sellers on board. It doesn’t mean this doesn’t happen, but this is not sustainable model for making money in the collectibles business. People like this dwindle away with a little bit of time.
Ignore and block user.
At the risk of sounding elitist, the best sign of a serial un-achiever is if they spend time trying to slow others down. I tell my students: If you want to catch your dreams, you’ve got to hit the gas. If you slow down to block others, you’ll never catch those dreams.
If someone had the capital to do it, he/she could buy up all PSA graded of whatever market they were trying to corner and try and establish a monopoly.
There are certainly people with the money to do that.
But if you were in a position to try that, you wouldn’t need to message other people to beg.
I don’t think this applies to even a 5th of priced listings, but I saw that message as well - it was done by one individual but I’ve heard of a small select few who have received messages like this from other people this year. But this isn’t the norm by ANY means.
But in regards to people with this kind of mentality:
