The PSA Partner Offers & Card Ladder price can be manipulated and exploited

[expedition]

Preamble

Over the past few days I’ve stumbled into some sort of conspiracy. By complete chance I’ve intercepted some form of money making. For those that play the hit 2013 MMORPG Old School RuneScape, it’s like I’ve caught gold traders in the act, using the Grand Exchange to leverage obscure items to transfer high sums of gold from one account to another. Except it’s not the Grand Exchange, nor obscure items, and it’s not from one account to another. It’s PSA’s Partner Offers, low pop cards, and wealth extraction from ‘partners’. I thought it would merit it’s own thread, because it’s simply not the same as accidentally inflated offers, and the implications can be massive. I will tell the story as it unfolded for me (but if you just want the conclusion, I’ve put a TL;DR summary at the bottom).

For the record, all of the following are my experiences and is my opinion. Any judgement of characters is purely moral, and everything regarding their intentions is alleged.

My story

For me, the story starts September 28th (2 days ago, lol), I receive a message on ebay for a listing (of a PSA 10 UED Rulers of the Heavens Salamence) from a potential buyer:

The offer is decent enough for me to bite, but I like the protection AG (Authenticity Guarantee) gives me, so bundled listings on high value items are out of the question (I realised the Pikachu is likely just a throw-in cheap second card to create a bundle, & I get suspicious). To this I receive the following reply:

When asked what their reasoning to avoid AG is, they said they just need the cards quicker.

I chose to ignore it. I don’t need this person, but they seem to need me, more specifically this card. A day later the card sells for asking price ($1200, ~1.5x the price of a 1st Edition). I randomly decide to check Pokedata.io (no endorsement, but I track rough values of my collection there), and notice the following:

Well that seems unbelievable. The 1st Edition was trading steadily at 700ish. I check it (note it’s actually the unlimited).

This just looks like a wash trade to me. My card was online at that time for a much lower price. Granted I don’t currently sell internationally, but this simply doesn’t make sense. Why would someone do this for an obscure card, with very limited population, with a price that is completely ridiculous.

Then it hit me all at once. The reason that buyer wanted a bundled sale; not only is it quicker, it also leaves no new data point on individual cards. The reason someone creates a price point that is completely unbelievable; the automated Card Ladder value and Partner Offers. I check the app, and you may have guessed it:

6.6K. You’re telling me I could’ve sold this card for 6.6K?! This morning I check if my sale registered as the Card Ladder value, and it did:

My opinion

Anyone tracking jumps in Card Ladder values can find these cards. Any low pop, infrequently traded card is on the table for manipulation and exploitation. All it takes is a single new, completely unbelievably priced sale. One you can manufacture yourself. And all it takes is a single copy of the card. The person who sold this card for 8.6K (I’m assuming to themselves or a relative in some fashion), paid ~1.1K in fees, for a potential pay-out of 6.6K. And I can’t help but wonder how many of the booming low-pop cards are currently being sold to partners.

Now this is not a how to guide, but I can imagine people are currently doing this already with random (un)commons. This is where no one is looking and the potential for abuse is rife. And I’m not talking about those that just send in random commons to grading in the hope of getting a good partner offer. Those guys are simply piggy-backing off the people doing the dirty work of creating the fake comps. Whether they know? I can only guess.

The kicker is, none of this seems explicitly illegal or provably against any TOS, it’s only immoral. By shining a light on it, I hope to incentivize change of the system, because in it’s current iteration, it doesn’t seem to have any guardrails.

Summary TL;DR

Anyone can manipulate the Card Ladder market value of a low-pop, infrequently traded PSA card by selling it to themselves or a relative on ebay. Because Partner Offers are automated based on the Card Ladder value, the system doesn’t check if it’s actually logical, but just spits out a buy price that can be multiple times higher than actual market price. The pay-out can vastly outweigh the fees for the ebay sale plus it’s actual value. There even seem to be people tracking which items have inflated Card Ladder values and try to buy them without leaving a new data point (n=1 on this though). Potentially, this loophole is already being used widely.

[pingy]

This could be used maliciously.

[expedition]

I couldn’t hold a candle to the work he’s done. But tbt no I did not write this to farm aura or something. You might be projecting something there ;). Imagine going through this rollercoaster, and then not having to talk about it. I just happened to uncover it by complete happenstance, and wished to make it public.

We’ve recently had the discussion regarding the morality of accidentally inflated offers, and this seemed like a logical follow-up. Curious if anyone had suspicions, was this like an open secret I just missed?

[crindy]

@expedition

You might be projecting something there

hmm are you sure, if vert wanted recognition and accolades for forum posting i think we would have heard about it by now…

[SnorlaxCap]

So PSA partner offers are automated? And they just take the inventory risk, hoping to sell it more more later?

[mrtonyz]

Building quite a reputation for yourself with useless and annoying comments like this.

@expedition Interesting find here, especially stumbling upon this accidentally. With frequent integration between new apps (soon Coinbase for eg.), you can definitely expect there to be exploitable methods that aren’t accounted for. Wow!

[expedition]

We don’t know the exact ins and outs of how partner offers are created, but they are some function of the Card Ladder value (It might be AI, it might be a simple algorithm). We’ve seen this before when the Card Ladder value goes haywire, the offers become ridiculous. Here’s the thread about that happening accidentally: Has anyone else had a PSA experience like this?

But if they buy everything at 80% MV, they can try to sell at 100%. These are simply the cases where the system doesn’t work as intended because MV isn’t correct.

[SnorlaxCap]

Yeah I saw that thread. Crazy. Thanks for the info.

[lyleberr]

But really, i thought manipulation was expected with things like this and its why so many users have criticized it. Not that people shouldnt want more money but because the collectors here value integrity over it.

[c0ll3ct0r]

@lyleberr

But really, i thought manipulation was expected with things like this

It would be shocking if it wasn’t used for that purpose.

[rtas]

Dark times we’re in. Recent comps are no longer reliable, everyone is asking 1M for their cards, and platforms responsible for providing buying/selling services couldn’t give 2 craps.

Also +1 to what @mrtonyz said, vert should be allowed one post every 24 hrs.

[bk2021]

I don’t remember if it was Discord or one of the many threads here, but there were a couple established users who referred to the Card Ladder play as something that had been happening for awhile - not that they were doing it, but that people have been manipulating it for months or longer to use it to flip at card shows and other places.

[c0ll3ct0r]

Fanatics Collect: Sellers Manipulating BINs

It is my opinion that some sellers are trying to take advantage of Fanatics Collect BINs by making fake sales to affect the consignment rate that they will get and the sales history of their item. For example, someone “bought” this Meiji Ancient Mew for $9,985, despite two copies being available for under $1,500 on Fanatics and eBay. [image] The card was relisted for, you guessed it, $9,985. But now it has the fake/inflated Card Ladder and Sales History Price. [image] [image] Because th…

[expedition]

different trick, same playbook it seems…

[Vertemes]

Block button is right there

But in all seriousness, it seems like they just base the card on last sold, which has multiple downsides, too many to get into. I was wondering if they could gather highesst sold and lowest sold price data over a 6 month periods as dots, remove any outliers over a certain %range, create a line of best fit on the graph for the average price, and then shade in the parts that are above/below the fit line that don’t intersect it as dots.

For example:

highest: 600, 550, 420

Lowest: 450, 400, 350

Average: 461

Use linear regression to find line of best fit aka recommended price

Possibly use 20% or 30% above/below line of best fit as potential offer prices?

Very rough example, but it could be a start to a solution for offers. It wouldn’t work for really low pop cards, but it works for cards that aren’t super common or common to find. It dosent really work for high pop cards as you really can find a average and just do 70%, nor does it work for really low pop cards, as you can really just list it however you want.

[brendantheclayboy]

I found out about this recently as well when I sold a corocoro card for an astounding price that I didn’t hesitate for a second when I saw the partner offer. It was ludicrous at the time (maybe 2 months ago) and it caused me to do a bit of digging. I came to the conclusion there was zero way it was not automated. It explains what could be determining a lot of sales recently, and i think this partner offer thing is going to go away real soon, my personal speculation. Thing are too easily manipulated these days.

[mrtonyz]

Imagine being a PSA Partner and getting a call from Nat Turner: “Thanks for auto spending $70000 on a holo rare dppt set card, the functions are working great!”

[tidaldreams]

lol there are lots of unpaids on cardladder and also solds that were paid but have the wrong date

wouldnt trust a sports bro website for pokemans i mean it can give u a general idea of the comps but really is only useful for stuff that sells a bajilion times like ultramoderns

[SolemnStar]

There is someone I bought cards from a while ago now, that had this whole gameplan figured out with some kind of big brain level math and understanding of ebay that I didn’t even understand. Anyways, the TL;DR is that manipulating prices has been going on for years.

However this post brings up something I thought was actually well known, and that I had ASSUMED they had “patched”. But yeah, I’ve heard people using it as an infinite money glitch. Grade a bunch of stupid random bulk. Buy and sell one copy at some stupid price to yourself or a friend. Then sell a bunch of them to the automated offer system, and make money grading bulk junk.

[Jmilly]

Hello! Actual buyer of this card here (longtime lurker but figured this would be the time to pop out of the woodwork). I noticed the offer immediately as well. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time I’ve seen a drastically inflated offer on a card like this. As you mention, low-pop non-English seems to be particularly ripe for this sort of pump.

Anyways, this card will be paired well with its Flygon 041 counterpart.

Cheers!