[x2drich2000]

Originally Posted by Mark17

Does that mean that in this case, the buyer paid PSA the full fee of grading a $5,000+ card, and only received the card back, in a sleeve, with the authentic-altered designation?

I was under the assumption, perhaps wrongly, that the fee paid by the buyer was smaller, but had it been a true high-grade card, PSA would've been asking for a higher fee to slab it with the decent numeric grade.

In general, you pay the fee for the value of the card regardless of whether it receives a grade or not. There have been cases where a card was submitted at a lower tier level, but when graded the card reached a value significantly above that lower tier level and PSA required the submitter to pay the higher tier level price. However, this is the exception rather than normal.