PSA with PSA UK lost ~650 cards and refuse to compensate anything. Looking for help

Hi!

My name is Max Tangvald and I am writing for my friend Martin who lost ~650 cards from his submission late 2020 with PSA. He has been one of the biggest middlemen to PSA in Sweden for almost 10 years. I would assume that you guys know the issues caused by PSA UK (former Ludkins), alot of cards were stuck for years and were finally sent back the last year and Martin got most of them back. But not all of them, somehow ~650 cards are still missing and were just declared lost by PSA.

So the problem now is that the cards are gone and Martin is offered no compensation from PSA. The cards were lost in PSA’s possession, and yet he is offered nothing. He should have the right to get the 200 usd bulk rate per card. But instead PSA is blaming Ludkins which were PSA UK at the time. They had PSA in their name at the time and were clearly a part of PSA.

So now Martin is refunding all the customers himself and have to sell a big part of his collection in order to do so. I think this is very unfair and im trying to help him out. I have reached out to Nat Turner and rcmiller@collectors.com but they are just ignoring the problem. If anyone here has any contact within PSA i would be very grateful to get some help.

We have video proof of the submission and have receipts of everything.

Here are Martins own words of that happened:

I am a group submitter from Sweden, which has around 650 cards still lost.
These cards were on the lists provided by Ludkins to PSA and The Sub Center, and were supposed to be safe at PSA.

In total we had 2590 cards stuck in the PSA limbo, but thanks to The Sub Center we had 1931 of them returned.

There is also another submitter from Sweden who is still missing around 200 cards, as well as a German submitter who had a large order lost. I think these are the main “large” ones. Apart from these there are many people who are missing smaller submissions, both in the UK and EU but seems to mainly be UK customers.
There have been three main-avenues to contact in order to find cards.

  1. is the dedicated PSA Ludkins email, which handled inquiries about already graded cards.

  2. is Flash-Cards Belgium, that for some reason had some of the returns for EU customers. I got one of my submissions through them, and one of my friends as well.

  3. is the Liquidators, they seem to have had all of the ungraded PSA UK customer cards that were never sent to PSA.

I have tried every single avenue above in order to locate the cards, and emailed back and forth a lot with PSA.
I have also talked to previous employees of Ludkins, who say that everything prior to the PSA closure was sent out.*

Barney Ludkins says that every order was sent, and tracking showed as received at PSA.
He also gave me submission numbers for my missing orders, but PSA say that they were never entered into their system.

I also tried to gather everyone in the PSA UK Facebook group who’s still missing cards, to try and piece together what orders that have been lost, but I cannot really find any consistency in the different missing orders and cards.

While doing this I also redirect everyone to the avenues mentioned above. A couple of people could claim their cards this way, but for some people the cards seem completely lost. After pushing PSA a lot and trying to figure out how to locate the cards, I finally got them to make a statement.*

They were supposed to update the customer communications page regularly, but stopped. This is the statement I just recently got from PSA:

Since late 2022, Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), both independently and with the assistance of its UK partner The Sub Center, has been diligently working to return to their rightful owners all trading cards submitted for grading on their behalf by former PSA Dealer Barney Ludkins (aka Anthos One, Ltd.). Because these orders were submitted directly to Mr. Ludkins, it was his sole responsibility to service and return the orders to his customers.

While the spreadsheet provided by Mr. Ludkins only contained the names of his customers (we were never provided any direct contact information), we have been successful in connecting with many of his direct submitters through our persistent outreach on social media and other hobby forums/channels. As a result of these efforts, we are proud to say that we have been able to return 98% of the cards to their rightful owners.

At this time, the only cards we have left are either on submissions tied to individuals who we have not been able to connect with despite our exhaustive outreach efforts and/or because there was no owner name listed by Ludkins.

Regards,
The PSA Customer Relations Team

And here are additional replies from them that are only related to my case:

In the case of RaukCard AB submissions, PSA was able to connect with his team early on and we can confirm that we have since returned all the cards that were listed under his name specifically. Therefore, PSA considers that account reconciled given that we no longer have any cards tied to his name according to Ludkins’ records.

We completely understand your frustration and truly sympathize with your situation. As much as we wish this was not the case, we do not have the items you are still missing within the unclaimed inventory and we would regretfully have to share that same news to those who reach out.

At the time you had communicated with The Sub Center, they may have been confirming that the two submissions (xxxxxxx and xxxxxxx) were on the lists provided to us by Ludkins without having physically checked yet. The submissions are on those lists from Ludkins, and the submission forms are valid, meaning they were created. However, they do not pull up any orders that have been entered which confirms that they were never received by PSA. The orders that The Sub Center shipped to back you were all that were associated with you as the owner.

Then they said:

You may direct customers who did not submit through you to this email. We will extend the deadline of keeping the remaining items until June of this year, after that time, we will liquidate the inventory to cover the Ludkins’ unpaid/outstanding balance.
That’s where we are standing now.

*PSA has unclaimed inventory that some people never reached out for.

*We are may people that desperately try to find our cards

*Anything left over will soon be liquidated to pay Ludkins debt
Let me know if you need additional details and info.

Thank you for taking the time reading this!

Kind regards
Max

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It’s a sad story but I’m just not sure what anyone can do about it. The only remaining recourse is legal action against PSA, if that’s worth it.

Even then I’m not fully convinced PSA is the party at fault here - or rather they are at fault for losing the cards but the party they owe is the defunct middleman. The core issue is Ludkins. That’s the risk of handing over your cards to a middleman. Or in this case what seems to be a middleman relying on another middleman and inheriting all their liabilities. Even if the name was “PSA UK”, they were not a PSA entity.

Not trying to take sides, just offering a dose of the reality of the situation. Seems like the obvious remaining path is a legal one. Otherwise selling off parts of the collection to compensate submitters is the right thing to do and what Ludkins should have done if they had the money.

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Did he himself not have business insurance?

A big Spanish submitter just had $70k of cards stolen by UPS. Absolutely sucks but they didn’t have insurance themselves when handling other people’s cards.

Pokemon “businesses” sadly often don’t act how they should.

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Probably not for this type of event i would guess

Yeah you are right, thanks for the input!

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Good luck!

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Pretty important to have it for theft/loss… especially when handling others cards.

Sucks to see, hope he can be made whole.

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Yeah but even if you have it it would be a nightmare got get a insurance company to pay out that big of an amount

Thanks!

Sorry for him but this is a very bad way of thinking about insurance or business risk in general.

He’s shipping cards for other people and being paid to do so…it’s his responsibility to make sure they are insured.

I once sent a submission for 3 people and was stressed out my arse the whole time.

Im speaking for me and not for him here, i agree that you need some systems in place if you are handling other peoples cards, but self insurnce is also a very valid option which alot of big companies use

If the insurance company isnt making money of you they either will charge you a big premium och choose to not work with you

That was a struggle to read with so many people and organizations involved—it’s such a mess. I thought all the Ludkins fallout had been resolved, but clearly not…

Goodluck to your friend however unlikely a positive resolution is!

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Seems like they’ve already sold everything two months ago in June, no?

Thanks!

The cards we are looking for are already lost, those were other uncollected cards i believe

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