Ugh…pass
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What the flying f!
Is this poliwag also trimmed?
Yep that’s trimmed looking. 3 cards from same seller and this isnt looking good for PSA either
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I’m actually interested in a few of his shadowless card auctions ending here soon but I think I’ll have to pass because it’s too sketchy. I’ve bought off this guy a few times before with no problems so idk what the deal is.
LOL a goddamn trimmed Poliwag. Are you kidding me? Forgive my language.
This is getting silly. I want to give the seller the benefit of the doubt… It’s most likely they purchased these all from the same source, but I thought they would double check every card after that Zard they took down recently…
PSA pls. Where are your metal rulers you supposedly slap on every card? 
I’ve had a look through several of his other auctions and some of them are honestly quite hard to tell. For the Clefairy the sharp lower corners and irregular card-case fitment was the giveaway for me… I wouldn’t touch that one. The Charizard was 100% trimmed. Some of the others are less convincing though. Like I said there could be up to 1.2mm variance top to bottom. The Poliwag is suspect to me but I don’t personally see enough evidence to rule it as absolutely being trimmed. So I suppose other buyers would have to decide whether its worth it to bid knowing historically what cards he’s dealt with.
Think of the top-bottom variance evaluation knowledge as an estimation of what it should look like and go from there. I don’t want everyone to think that any variance at all is a sure sign. I suppose I’d give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.
Edit: 1.2mm is a little less than the thickness of an American dime, to give some scale. (1.35mm)
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Look like there’s more. This seems to also be the dude who graded 8 or so PSA 10 1st Edition Jungle Flareons in a day. Now I’m sketched out as fuck. I don’t mean to witch hunt but I haven’t seen such sharpness on corners on any other sellers items I’ve looked at.
Seems to be most of the newer submissions in the higher grades. 28222[2-3]XX. I’m not an expert so can someone tell me if these corners appear on Holos a lot?
Bottom Left:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Kangaskhan-1st-Edition-5-64-MINT-9-PSA/272926381816
Top Right and Bottom left look too sharp:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Magneton-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-Mint-9-9-102/272921668493
Top Right
www.ebay.ca/itm/Charizard-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-8-NM-Mint-4-102/311999005498
Top Left/Right
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Snorlax-1st-Edition-11-64-MINT-9-PSA/272921641591
Top Right lol
www.ebay.ca/itm/Chansey-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-Mint-9-3-102/272921673024
Top Left/Right
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Jolteon-1st-Edition-4-64-MINT-9-PSA/311998972664
Top Left/Bottoms
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Flareon-1st-Edition-3-64-MINT-9-PSA/272921606147
Left side is obvious
www.ebay.ca/itm/1999-Pokemon-Base-Set-Gastly-1st-Edition-Shadowless-PSA-Gem-Mint-10-50-102/272921586084
Bottom Left:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Kangaskhan-1st-Edition-5-64-MINT-9-PSA/311998973053
Bottom Right:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Snorlax-1st-Edition-11-64-GEM-MINT-10-PSA/311998994411
Top Left:
www.ebay.ca/itm/1999-Pokemon-Raichu-Holo-Base-Shadowless-PSA-Near-Mint-7-14-102/311997521682
Top Left:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Machamp-1st-Edition-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-Mint-8-8-102/272921663762
Bottom Right and Top left look too sharp
www.ebay.ca/itm/1999-Pokemon-Base-Set-Dracaufeu-1st-Edition-French-PSA-Mint-9-4-102-Charizard/311998967915
Bottom Right Edge:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Charizard-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-7-NM-4-102/272921671001
Right Edge:
www.ebay.ca/itm/1999-Pokemon-MewTwo-Holo-Base-Shadowless-PSA-Mint-9-10-102/272918420917
Top Edge:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Snorlax-1st-Edition-11-64-MINT-9-PSA/312000907793
Top Right:
www.ebay.ca/itm/1999-Pokemon-Base-Tangela-1st-Edition-Shadowless-PSA-Gem-Mint-10-66-102/311998934211
Maybes:
Top Edge:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Jolteon-1st-Edition-4-64-MINT-9-PSA/312000847939
Right Side looks possibly trimmed, more hints on backside:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-10-Jungle-Holo-Jolteon-1st-Edition-4-64-Gem-MINT-10-PSA/272926358084
Iffy Bottom right and right edge, I doubt it on this one:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Gyarados-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-Mint-9-6-102/311999001667
Top left possibly, hard to tell and the camera angle is suspect:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Alakazam-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-Mint-9-1-102/311999007244
He listed this one with a reused photo and has title wrong, was one of the trimmed ones above:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-PSA-Jungle-Holo-Snorlax-1st-Edition-11-64-MINT-8-PSA/272926522487
Little suspect on bottom right and the bottom in general:
www.ebay.ca/itm/Blastoise-Base-Set-Pokemon-Game-Holo-PSA-Mint-9-2-102/311999006414
PSA Holy shit what is this.
Holy shit. I bought from him before and had no problems and the card is fine. Maybe he just bought out someone’s collection and the previous owner trimmed them? Wow, ‘buy the card, not the grade’ is at it again.
So I’ve bought quite a few cards off of this seller in the last few years. I just had a look at some of the cards I bought off of him… ummmm what do we think? Hopefully I’m just a bit paranoid.
Bottom edge
Bottom edge
Edge?
Top right (There’s also a lot of fraying at the top. Like extra white above the border of the card. Kind of like if you cut something and it wasn’t clean so there’s a bit left over)
Wow. I think we’re past the point of assuming this seller only bought a handful of trimmed cards off a shady seller.
Good find guys. This is very concerning.
I looked over my cards, paying special attention to the ones I got off this guy, and they all seem fine. There was a couple corners from various sellers that weren’t perfectly round but I think that is somewhat common.
@spinch I kinda want to err on the side of those being non-trimmed. Idk tho pinsir looks a little sharp. Hopefully @jkanly can chime in on those.
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Do you have any evidence of this?
High angled edges prior to the corner do appear on WOTC holos and on Nintendo cards too. However they shouldn’t be sharp looking… specifically on only one side of a corner. The difference on some is very subtle.
The shadowless mewtwo looks plausible specifically because of the right-left spacing. At some point it comes down to PSA physically measuring the card though as there’s only so much you can do judging photos.
I must not be seeing what you’re seeing for the other ones… Is there a specific one that jumps out to you?
Those look fine to me. The card-case fitment looks solid (I’m looking for poor tolerances), and that’s what matters most before moving on to look at the edges.
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Good detective work @nysyr.
@jkanly - I think looking at the left-right/top-bottom fit is a great place to start when trying to verify whether these cards are trimmed (perhaps, ‘sanded’ would be a better term - this kind of looks like someone using an incredibly fine sanding tool to get these edges the way they are). However, the corners do look irregular - so irregular in fact that they should be a dead giveaway every single time. Do you have any cards in your own collection that have corners like these? I can safely say that I do not. In fact, I’ve only ever seen sharp corners like these on PSA-graded ebay listings, which leads me to suspect there might be some foul playing going on.
There was a mention in another thread about how a very successful collector often used superfine sandpaper on his cards before submitting them to Beckett, and would routinely get 10s back. Perhaps this seller ‘numismaticgmc’ has had a taste of success that comes with altering the cards and does so prolifically? I have noticed that a lot of his sold listings are ‘obscured’ so-to-speak, i.e., the title will be ‘PSA 10 cards for a customer’ for $5,000 but the only picture will be the back of a card.
@hypernova
I can explain that. So eBay had a flash sale for 18% off store wide for one day. I was talking to him about it and wanted to take full advantage of the deal. He said he had some cards in grading atm but we didn’t know what was coming back so I bought store credit off of him and later I decided which cards I wanted. Nothing suss there. Other times we’ve agreed on some cards and he would create a special listing.
@jkanly
I hope you’re right. Some of the edges do look very sharp. I’m looking at my other jungle 1st edition cards and none of them have those sharp edges… but you think I’ve got nothing to worry about?
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There are edge perfecting processes I know of that use precise trimming tools… I’ve never heard of card sanding though. That’s an interesting thought.
I took a look at mine again and I do have a few known authentic cards graded that have a edge high angle next to the corner radius. Here are a couple of the worst I could find (out of ~250 graded cards I have immediately on hand):
Note how the high angle is only minorly visible on the front of the cards. Compared with David’s Clefairy where the edge clearly looks cut.
I suppose like anything it comes down to degree. How sharp of an angle it should be or shouldn’t be I can’t tell you because it seems a little subjective. I can usually tell from a glance having looked at maybe a couple hundred thousand cards by now what the real deal looks like. But not everyone has that experience though, so it comes down to degree. Although I dislike sharing any information that helps counterfeiters I feel there is enough of this type of information out there that this shouldn’t be a problem. So here’s a mock up of what I’m looking for, or at least the best I could describe in MS paint on my tablet.
I realize the difference might be very slight but that’s what I look for. There needs to be a metric to compare the cards with to find out whether there is material missing. The PSA case itself is a fairly good metric because it has proven to be highly consistent.
@spinch I do think they are ok. The top right corner of #27342345 looks like one of the worst of mine above. The top edge fraying is also completely normal and common especially for Jungle and early Base cards.
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@jkanly
Well that’s a relief. Thanks for looking into it! It does seem to be a problem though for PSA. I remember that Venusaur that went on the last PWCC auction. The bottom was surely trimmed.
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The biggest flag for me is the sheer number of cards it occurs with
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+1 on this comment. Seems to be quite common nowadays unfortunately. This stems to other cards like MTG =/
I just bought this card and would like your guy’s opinion so you think this card is trimmed on the left side?
- Border offcenter but even on all 3 sides except left
- Guy said pack fresh and that he got the first edition base pack from ebay and opened it himself… too good to be true?
- left edge looks slightly rougher than right as if it was freshly cut