Graded vs. Raw Rant.......

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by raulus

I think we've seen some cards in counterfeit slabs. Probably not enough to constitute flooding. But it's certainly not zero.

I thought I heard somewhere that some goons were running around with their own supply of slabs and a machine for making it happen.

From what I've seen, the cards they snuck into those slabs, when closely inspected, suggested that there was clearly a problem. Cards that should grade at maybe a 5, but were in a 9 slab, etc. Before one of the TPG haters suggests that even the genuine ones experience this overgrading phenomenon, my experience is that such an extreme outcome is a real outlier.

Yes there are several posts on this forum about "Copperfield" and his scam out of Mexico, including one about a recent arrest of a guy in Denver. I helped out a guy who bought what was almost certainly one of these cards out of a Goodwin auction. As I discovered, it had the same cert as a completely different and clearly legit card with the same grade, and obviously Copperfield had replicated the cert on an inferior card. To our shock, PSA blessed the card and put it in a new cert. A true WTF moment.