Be careful with your CGC “error” cards. What are your thoughts on the recent CGC situation?
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My thoughts are that the submitter didn’t read the terms of service (literally point #3) and got what they deserved. People who blindly follow his video and take it as fact are even worse 
CGC has already corrected this issue inside anyway. The way it works is that the graders are supposed to give errors to the higher ups but one employee in particular didn’t follow protocol and thought they would authenticate them without giving them to the error team/proper employees.
The card’s certificates were revoked too so if you look them up they don’t show up as legit cards.
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I personally wouldn’t go out of my way to try and game the system, regardless of it being an experiment. Ban is deserved. That being said, CGC is still the biggest loser here. Quite an embarrassing look to authenticate those tampered cards.
Is there a reason why this person chose to even do this? Or were they just purely trying to cause drama? To me this short video just makes everyone look bad.
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I’d like to actually see the correspondence he had with CGC in full, rather than specific screenshots that support his case. I have no doubt in my mind that these slipped through and CGC is right to be embarassed by it, but mans operated in bad faith and deserved to be banned from using CGC. He isn’t worth the trouble.
Also I think he means legal ‘recourse’ not resource.
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The scandal is that they followed their ToS?
“Customer represents and warrants that it has no knowledge and no reasonable basis for belief that any collectible submitted is not genuine or contains any non-disclosed alterations or restorations, including, but not limited to, trimming, re-coloring, bleaching, power erasing, re-backing, artificially toning, applying or removing punches or stamps, or any other method used to change or enhance the appearance, condition, or content of a collectible (collectively “Tampering” or “Tampered”). Customer acknowledges that Tampering is wrongful and violations of this Section 3 shall entitle Company to compensatory damages and injunctive relief, as appropriate.”
Banning = injunctive relief
Obviously, CGC screwed up by letting the card slip by in the first place. But all grading companies make mistakes sometimes. Not exactly a “scandal.” If every rebacked card PSA/BGS graded was a scandal…there would be a lot of scandals lol.
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For the record, PSA has done similar things like this to submitters that try to slip things through. The points that follow don’t only apply to CGC.
From the perspective of the grading companies, i get why they don’t like people “testing” the system. From the perspective of the customer, I say why not? What are they afraid of? These companies have 3 main goals: authenticate the card, grade it, put it in a case. Authentication is their product. Do they not have confidence in their own product?
If you claim to be a professional authenticator, things shouldn’t slip though in a systematic way. I get that mistakes can always happen, but they shouldn’t be common. If you can’t consistently distinguish an authentic item from a fake, you have no right to be authenticating that item.
A confident and courageous company should encourage you to try and break the system. For example, the software that powers this forum has a place you can go where they will pay you if you find security vulnerabilities and notify them [without revealing them publicly]. A grading company can offer the same kind of reward system. $500 if you can get something through that shouldn’t be slabbed ‐ or have an existing problematic card that is already in a case and you send it in.
I already hear the counterpoints about the practical realities of grading that might make this not work well. But I just wanted to offer a different perspective. Any grading company that rolled out something like this would immediately stand out as the most trusted grading company in my mind. It just aligns the incentives with getting things right. There would be consequences for mistakes and they could also continually learn where the blindspots are in their process (exactly like this situation in the OP)
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A bug bounty system similar to pen-testing would be great, but I doubt they would go for it. That would definitely give whichever grading company did it a lot more credibility.
This has parallels to real-world pen-testing too, where it’s illegal to pen-test websites without their permission (in this case you get banned from submitting instead of being charged with a federal crime).
3 Likes
This is the type of drama that the Pokemon sphere doesn’t need more of. The submitter shouldn’t have sent in altered cards. CGC shouldn’t have authenticated said altered cards and has no business in authenticating miscut cards that could be replicated by hand (e.g., upside-down backs and overlapping print miscuts are difficult to replicate).
I think CGC did the right thing. 
11 Likes
Altered cards have been submitted since the beginning of time. It is literally their core business proposition to identify alters as part of their authentication process.
In 2010 there was a guy who had an entire website with a write up about in general what he altered and stress tested PSA (old baseball cards, I think he even tried it with a high profile Honus Wagner). He did things like removing smoke smells, bleaching the card whiter, even filling in holes. It passed PSA authentication and got up graded. I recall he told PSA afterwards what he did and what they should look out for.
CGC should have said -ok thanks for letting us know, here’s a promo coupon. We’ll improve our system!
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This whole thing is such a non-story I don’t understand how its getting so much air time. People are just desperate for some drama I guess.
Guy tries to deceive grading company, succeeds, and is confused when he gets banned for it. All parties look bad, move on
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Expected from CGC to be honest
The submitter did this to get views and is happy to have a big ol soap box to stand on. CGC did the right thing banning them or this guy would just keep testing the system without hesitation. CGC should be catching this sort of thing however. It’s a poor look for their reliability. You cant just slab everything coming your way. PSA can be annoying with how they do not accept legit cards, but give them credit for being extra cautious.
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if this is done through a middleman, will the middleman be banned?
It feels like Youtube has made the world dumber. I’m old so I remember when you’d have some sort of DIY issue and some random cheery person had the solution in 3 minutes or less.
Now we have someone who gamed a system for likes for their channel and is now perplexed at the outcome that anyone could see coming a mile off.
CGC aren’t covering themselves in glory either
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I hadnt heard of cgc even acknowledging this. Do you have an article or somewhere i can read about their correction?
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Man. I wish I had gotten back into the hobby years ago when people were just here because they enjoyed Pokemon cards and weren’t trying to get rich or intentionally stir up trouble–sorry, do an “experiment”–for views.
I sound like my dad 
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Here’s an old thread where a long-time member got PSA to grade an FPO Charizord as a regular Expedition one: The Charizard that PSA does not want you to see
They banned him after they found out. I leaned into the clickbait 
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Honestly anything that is done for views and likes dumbs down the population, whatever platform it may come from.
Make sure to smash that heart button and subscribe so you don’t miss any of my posts and make sure to check out my linktree for my Amazon wishlist and my twitch and my patreon and my YouTube and my Instagram and my discord and my cashapp link and….
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“CGC made a mistake and now I’m banned”
“I lead CGC into a Honeypot and knowingly sent in altered cards for my YouTube video and then they enacted their ToS terms”
Is way less cool
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CGC shouldn’t grade replicable errors and this guy needs to take the community flag out of his back
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