I'm not a doctor (of cards), or a lawyer, but my question is who is the person that broke the law? If you have a card in your personal collection that you purchased in a TPG holder and you sell it, but it is later discovered that the card was trimmed, did you commit a crime by simply selling an unknowingly altered card? If it's the unknowing owner of the card that sold it, I fear most collectors that own purchased high graded TPG cards and ever sell them could be criminally prosecuted for committing a crime they didn't even realize was happening. If it was the trimmer who originally trimmed the card, how do you prove who that was, unless they were dumb enough to video themselves trimming the card, I don't see how it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that any certain person trimmed a certain card.
I don't foresee anyone ever actually getting prosecuted for these crimes, because it appears that the person who could be convicted in most cases is in reality an innocent person, whereas the true guilty party that has committed a crime, is committing a crime that is virtually impossible to prove. If you extend the guilt to all people that were in the chain of ownership of the card, then you are going to have an awful long list of people and not very many left in the hobby that couldn't be named at some point in a court case.
In my opinion the true crime that was committed was done by the TPG company that gave the card a numerical grade. These companies were providing a service for a fee to detect these altered cards and have truly failed the entire hobby with the service they have provided. I look at one card in particular that I am personally experienced with, the 1968 O-Pee-Chee Billy Williams card. These were all factory mis-cut cards from the factory, not a couple sheets of them, but every single one of them due to their positioning on the sheet and the sheet cutting technology that was used at the time. PSA has however given a numerical graded to a handful of these cards over the years. I have personally seen and looked at a few of these PSA graded cards, and every last one of them is factory mis-cut short, along with every one of the hundreds of raw one's that I have looked at over the last decade. This is a case of PSA failing to do the job they were paid to do.
I'm not sure that the trimming of cards is more rampant in the hobby today than it ever was, the difference today from 1980 is today we have trusted? companies making huge profits off of collectors for doing a sub-par job of detecting these altered cards.
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