where are the baseless accusations? The 2020 Ludkins UK submission fees were paid to a certain Ronald Hurlocker from Black Card X LLC, that’s a fact. Now what I want to know is what the link between Black Card X LLC and Ludkins UK is.
What we also know is that Ludkins UK has no more money to pay for any of the submissions from November 2020 until now. How many cards are we speaking of? 10k, 20k, 100k? I guess we can easily assume 50k cards since Ludkins UK was easily the biggest PSA middlemen. Customers paid on average £10 per card to Ludkins, that would add up to £500’000 that was spend on anything but PSA grading fees. I doubt that Barney had 5 full time employees during PSA’s shutdown sitting on their thumbs all day.
It is a shit situation and my heart goes out to everyone whose effected. I hope everyone will get their cards back sooner rather than later. People are angry and have every right to be.
I do not however feel Barney went out to scam anyone or had any intent to defraud people of their cards. Having graded through Ludkins for 9 plus years I’ve never had an issue with their service until now. I recently graded a tropical wind through them in August and all went smoothly. Currently I have a recent submission which I assume is stuck in the US and filled in the form so hopefully will get it back. I’ve met Barney on a few occasions and in the summer when I dropped my tropical wind to him he mentioned some of the issues @haggiscollects has outlined above such as issues PSA UK being given a certain rate only for the US service to uncut it.
I don’t believe PSA US is entirely innocent in all this.
From what we have seen there definitely seems to be issues with mismanagement and communication from Ludkins, however I find it uncomfortable to see the witch-hunt this seems to have become on social media.
Similar to what @acebren said - I imagine that “accepting the cards back without payment” also locks them into certain terms of payment in the future that they are unable to manage. Simply put there must be something more to it than just sending the cards back and wiping the slate for the benefit of the collectors involved, otherwise that would be a slam dunk.
The thing that stands out to me in all this is that customer and submission info wasn’t shared with PSA. again, this must be because in giving that info to PSA Ludkins would have to submit to some agreement that they are resistant to agreeing to.
Shouldn’t be an issue. Generally when importing back to the UK/EU you pay a flat £21 disbursement fee to FedEx, per shipment (doesn’t matter how many cards are in it). I would imagine from a risk mitigation point of view, even though they were doing subs at one point each month, they’d have been sent across multiple packages but even then, the £21 fee per shipment should be negligible.
Is anybody in here familiar with that Marx Card situation? So how long did it take from PSA‘s first „we will send your cards back“-announcement until the first & the last person received their cards back?
I’m seeing people say how there was always good business in the past. But this makes me question still how long has new money been paying for old orders? For all we know that was the business model the past 5 years. Now I doubt that long but you get the point there is no telling how long this has been going on.
I don’t care about any excuses and have zero cards in limbo myself. Under no circumstances should a company accept a service they can’t complete without accounting for unforseen circumstances (PSA shut down, Their reputation being ruined, Law suits etc) If you’re charging a customer let’s say $10 upfront. Your cost is let’s say $7 a card. Your profit is $3 a card. The only money that should be used for any expenses including Labor is that $3 a card profit.
So not only did they take the $3 a card profit or whatever actual number it was. But they also took the whole grading fee while giving Bullshit excuses for what years now?!? Not to mention the cost of all the actual cards… This is millions of dollars easily… This is so bad!
Yeah I feel as shit as it reads that PSA knew about the financial issues and just waited for him to fail, He was still taking orders last month, i sent my Cards in September, having emails with a guy called Thomas, who I actually cant see any mention of as working for them
People trying to say like this guy was trying and trying to garner some sympathy for the guy, he has done alot of dodgy shit that he needs to be held accountable for, In my option, Fuck him he seems a 2 Faced Fuck,
And to carry on from that, his website still shows Him as PSA UK, which he hasn’t taken down, all he has done is point the finger back at PSA, Changed his FB, made a statement, and fucked off again with a empty promise of getting people’s cards back
The fact those documents are still down shows his true intentions. He doesn’t care about all those people who have been waiting for a very long time and now face an even longer time because of this situation. That’s even besides the fact he used our money for different things. His words are empty and dont mean anything. All I can hope for is that he makes it PSA as easy as possibly to identify the cards for the original owners.
There is nothing positive that can be said about him. Do I think it would have turned out like this if it wasnt for Covid? No, I do believe his (part of) company was legit. But how he handled things both during and after covid shows how little he thinks of his customers. He had his employees telling us lies everytime we asked about our cards. He spend the money that should have been put aside for the fees on other stuff. The fact the cards are still stuck on America because he cant pay for it costs us alot of money aswell as the pokemon market plummited in the mean time.
Untill he pays me my 2k+ money back as he broke his end of the agreement and gives PSA every information they need to process things there is nothing positive to be said about him. Great to hear that the years prior to 2020 were all great with Barney, but you are only as good as your last performance.