PSA’s recent fraud report has identified a variety of prominent counterfeiting trends, but most interesting to me was the section on the rise of alteration in Pokemon cards. According to PSA, while detected sports card alteration has only increased by 1.6%, Pokemon card alteration has increased by over 400% from last year.
Insane to see a quantitative analysis of the level of normalization that card altering has amongst uneducated hobby members/grifters hoping to profit. And this only captures the alterations that PSA detects, I am sure they are not accurately catching everything. Old cert victory dance, old certs never lose.
Be weary of percentages without the count data. If PSA struggles with identifying which cards are altered and their baseline data, for example, identified only 10 altered cards, a 400% increase would mean they found an additional 40 cards. Obviously this is a clear problem but the data they are providing masks the true relationships here. I didn’t read the entire report so maybe the count data is somewhere in there.
Youd think psa would try and go after these big card cleaners. There are dozens of them actively altering and submitting thousands of cards. Can’t be that hard to do something…
Whoa whoa whoa now, respectable card cleaning and restoration companies generally have terms in their service agreements that say their product and services are only for visual purposes and they do not stand by trying to grade any card that is professionally restored by their service or product. Its not their fault all sorts of greedy scumbags are abusing their amazing techniques that make a card seem in better condition than it is to try tricking innocent graders.
Feels kinda like youre pointing fingers the wrong way.
The Prismatic Eevee promo is the most hilarious; who is out here altering or cleaning a relatively cheap ultra modern card with who knows how many copies in circulation?
I was a little bit surprised though that the most altered were modern? I guess I would have thought that the alterations would be on vintage cards to try and get them to 10.
I’d assume its due to the difficulty of finding mint/NM vintage? I guess you can always crack PSA 7-8+ vintage but that adds another barrier of entry vs modern cards where the mint/NM supply is absolutely massive, both graded and ungraded.
Quality control has been in the toilet with modern. Lots of “fixing” edges and corners.
Also if a modern card stonks it does so quickly, and usually at an extreme rate so sometimes people didnt realize what their kids pulled until after it got one or two creases in it.
Motivation: cards are surging in price faster than ever and this fact is being broadcasted by influencers and media outlets (often reporting on the insane behavior of flippers and long wait times for valuable cards).
Opportunity: due to the surging prices, popularity has swelled and grading companies are struggling to keep up with the deluge of cards they receive. With poor quality control, alterations are sometimes not detected and fraudsters have the window to “get away with it” open.
Rationalization: With new entrants that care more about the money than integrity, rationalization is less an active thought process and more a function of the fraudster’s bottom line. Money > everything.
I’d be interested to know what’s below the top 4 “fastest-growing counterfeit targets”. The fact that there’s so much XY era here makes me think rising market values are spurring uninformed fans to submitting counterfeits they’ve had in their binders for 10 years. Without knowing more, I would assume these aren’t new counterfeits being printed in 2026 - if I’m correct in that assumption, I feel like that makes the situation a bit brighter than these numbers might suggest.
The increase in altered cards is the real story here. Be careful buying NM singles in person without inspecting them first. The majority of this fraud probably isn’t flowing through PSA.
It’s nice to see PSA being more direct about how they’re using AI in their grading process. Not a fan of them using it in their writing though
iykyk
