PSA grade changed from 9 to 10 after grading completed

New update:

Let me clarify,

My changing from a PSA 9 to a PSA 10 was a unique situation trigged by someone in PSA who saw my original post displaying all of the 9s. It was obvious that the grades originally given were not fair, and so the entire sub was re-graded.

This was done without my knowledge, and PSA did not know I had already accepted buy back offers. I know this raises other concerns but no fraud or malicious activity was taking place here

tl;dr His post on Twitter caught the attention of an employee, who had his submission re-graded after grading was completed (and after he had already accepted offers on cards), and some of those cards turned from a PSA 9 to a PSA 10.


Original post:

This guy on Twitter submitted a large quantity of Pikachu Zekrom GX cards to PSA. All of them graded a 9 or lower. Made a huge video about the issue, dissatisfied about the situation. He accepted offers on most of his submitted cards.

Then today, he posted a new update (which can be found here: https://x.com/PZPTCG/status/1996701380820516911?s=20) - many of the cards which showed a PSA 9 grade, and had an offer using the PSA 9 value of the card, now showed an updated PSA 10 grade instead.

Can be seen below on some of his cards (same cert, grade changed after offer accepted):

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It’s either a glitch in their system or a blaten scheme. If PSA was really grading 9s, buying them back, and then converting them to 10s, wouldn’t the smart evil thing to do is pull a new cert # ?

Also, for modern you only grade 10s, so why accept a lowball $35 offer when you can crack and resubmit?

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No, please dont tell me grading is a scam!?!? :open_mouth:

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Glitch makes the most sense. But I’m sure everyone who has graded recently is going back into their submissions and re-checking certs if they accepted PSA offers.

The real question is did PSA pay the difference because of the grade change I’m sure there has to be some record of the payout per card vs the value currently. If they did not then there is going to be some backlash cause this is not a good look.

PSA is buying 9’s and bumping to 10’s for greed (not even changing the cert) pretty much destroys their reputation which is arguably more valuable than a couple of modern cards.

side note: wasn’t there that thing where PSA buying up vendor’s entire collection basically doing that whole monopoly thing. I don’t know is it a long term scheme who knows.

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Looks like PSA is “making it right” for that person & acknowledging it as a “one-off situation”.

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That’s good. But there’s a very good chance it’s happened to others and most people don’t go back to check the certs of their prior submissions after they’ve already accepted offers on the cards. I probably wouldn’t have ever checked.

Wait, so because this person made a bunch of noise on social media, PSA went back to “manually review” the grades and gave them more 10s? That’s absurd.

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Yeah the wording does seem to suggest that…

Unless they mean “reviewing the grades in the system which were incorrect due to this one-off error”.

I don’t know what to believe at this point.

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The only hope is they were originally 9s, then QA Check bumped them up to 10s, but their system showed them as the original 9 grade. Otherwise grading is done for.

I don’t know if this has anything to do with the backend/frontend system of PSA or the changed grade/glitch, but I have a card listed on eBay that has the wrong card pictured on eBay’s cert system lookup. I don’t know how because PSA’s cert lookup has the correct card pictured and I’ve never seen scans of the wrong card in the case when I initially graded the card at PSA.

Thought maybe this means that PSA gives scans of cards to eBay/GameStop/etc. that may be different from what we see on their website. Not sure if there is some explanation for the issue somewhere or what but thought I’d mention it here. Either way this is pretty trashy of PSA whether it was an accidental error or not (talking about the changed grade after offer situation in the OP).

Anyway, here’s the card using the PSA scan and then the scan that’s used on eBay. The scan of the back is the same Lugia on both PSA and eBay.

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This is apparently what happened. He just posted an update:

Let me clarify,
My changing from a PSA 9 to a PSA 10 was a unique situation trigged by someone in PSA who saw my original post displaying all of the 9s. It was obvious that the grades originally given were not fair, and so the entire sub was re-graded.

This was done without my knowledge, and PSA did not know I had already accepted buy back offers. I know this raises other concerns but no fraud or malicious activity was taking place here

So make enough noise about your PSA 9s and PSA will bump up a few of your grades

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@A.P.Speeze This seems easy enough to… not mess up. But yet, here we are.

@asleep Was there a separate post about him complaining about the 9s? And how would they even identify the sub was misgraded from some guy complaining about cards in their vault.

If that update is true, that’s a bit of a yikes from me. I can totally see how it’d be a one time mistake, but at the same time, what are the chances the one time mistake just happened to be a time when the results were made public enough for them notice? Ugh.

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Yea. See here (or below): https://x.com/PZPTCG/status/1996242915677360337?s=20

Basically all got 9s. A lot of them truthfully deserved 9s (or 8s) with bad centering/etc, but it was making waves on social media so PSA gave him a free regrading it seems.

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I spent about an hour or two looking into what you saw on your listing for some reasons.

When you do a “Right Click” → “Open Image in New Tab”, you’ll get a new tab with the image’s URL. Then, if you remove the size from the URL (i.e. “/large” or “/medium”) it’ll give you the original image (aka the biggest resolution).

What you see from Ebay’s pop report is here: https://d1htnxwo4o0jhw.cloudfront.net/cert/144441667/p_SG4r8R-UyNsh6iD6dMGA.jpg

What you see from PSA’s pop report is here: https://d1htnxwo4o0jhw.cloudfront.net/cert/144441667/9E2UFttnLEehX-g_98avnA.jpg

Some other random Jumbo JP Galarian Moltres is here: https://d1htnxwo4o0jhw.cloudfront.net/cert/145713651/59Wo0JSwQ0KWeAgOuGcWwg_6572e.jpg

From both Ebay and PSA’s pop report, the images use the same domain so they’re coming from the same source: PSA’s system. Both back images are the same URL.

If you download and compare the Lugia and the Moltres with the Lugia label, zooming in really deep, you’ll notice that the grooves on the case look identical, I think what happened is that PSA accidentally encased the wrong card, the Moltres, then noticed the issue so they took the Moltres out then placed in the Lugia properly.

The resolution size of the two images are also the same, whereas some other random Jumbo JP Galarian Moltres has a much higher resolution. What this tells me is that for the resolution size of the two images to be the same, they must have been taken using the same machine, time and/or process. It’s not a strong evidence for my theory but it’s something.

Using PSA’s public API, I was able to see that only 2 images come back, the proper ones, so I assume Ebay is using a different API and that one is returning all images instead of just the most recent which leads to odd behaviors as Ebay probably doesn’t expect that scenario.

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Sounds like a scam…

Not a great look for PSA. Very strange that they re-slabbed the card and printed a new label with the same cert number but a different grade. I’m sure this will be forgotten about a week from now though.

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The PSA buyback system is asking for trouble and it’s still baffling to me that everyone is ok with it simply because the offers are generally good.

That being said, they’re not gonna scam on a 30$ zekrom when they could easily do the same for 1000x the reward on another card…

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So if you have enough clout, you can complain publicly to PSA and get your grades reviewed for a bump? smdh

Both the issue and the resolution are awful looks for PSA. Hopefully they can identify how this happened and never do it again.

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