https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/grading-firm-wata-i...
IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.
It'd be naive to expect the pokemon card industry to be better regulated.
Theoretically, there is much less chance of “liar loans” due to digital real time records via services like The Work Number and ADP.
Part of the 2008 financial crisis was that lenders were giving loans out to anybody, and then even though information was available showing the low likelihood of paying back those mortgages the rating agencies rated the bundles of mortgages as high quality low risk.
So the problem starts with loans going to anyone, but the crisis was caused by ratings agencies wanting to keep clients rather than do their jobs.
Banks had plenty of options, they purposefully decided not to use them.
Or llc's by departments of state
Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.
So as whole the process is quite questionable at times.
Not to even talk about some things slipping through or being questionable in documenting.
ETA: And I don't mean a "reasonable people making subjective judgements" type variation ... I'm talking about like a 6 vs an 8.5 or 9 (out of 10).
Are you suggesting they are deliberately misleading people, or are you saying grading is not consistent and is subjective based on circumstance around when the item is graded.
If grading is subjective, then I don't see the value of the process and would consider it a scam, personally.
> If grading is subjective, then I don't see the value of the process
This made me curious to check the PSA grading standards, turns out it's both.[0]
Personally, as a very young kid I collected baseball cards, unfortunately for me, this was the very late 80's & early 90's. While I have some cards that are my favorites, would be pointless to grade cards that are practically worthless.
[0] https://www.psacard.com/gradingstandards
>> While it's true that a large part of grading is objective (locating print defects, staining, surface wrinkles, measuring centering, etc.), the other component of grading is somewhat subjective. The best way to define the subjective element is to do so by posing a question: What will the market accept for this particular issue?
>> Again, the vast majority of grading is applied with a basic, objective standard but no one can ignore the small (yet sometimes significant) subjective element. ... The key point to remember is that the graders reserve the right, based on the strength or weakness of the eye appeal, to make a judgment call on the grade of a particular card.
This sort of thing happens all the time in grading – a later reveal shows that earlier gradings were obviously incorrect in the mind of any collector. That means that they have such a poor objective process as to be no better than subjective analysis.
Graders ultimately sell reputation. Like currency, grading only works if you believe in it. Don't believe the grader? Then their word isn't worth anything. This means as more and more of these issues happen, graders will struggle to retain that trust, and when it disappears it disappears rapidly.
Also a lot of their income comes from convincing people who aren't educated on the market to grade extremely common items that will never be worth any significant amount of money no matter what "grade" they get; not actually a scam in that case but it shows you what their real priorities are.
I've also seen them set up booths at sci-fi conventions where you can pay to have them "authenticate" things you got signed by celebrities. In this case the authentication is entirely separate from the signature so there's nobody who can actually testify that they witnessed William Shatner signing your crap, only that they know your crap and William Shatner were in the same convention center at the same time.
For grading companies and for auction houses, the goal is to move the highest possible volume of goods at the highest possible valuation. They're not going out of their way to root out non-obvious fraud. They operate with the assumption that 99% of the traffic they're handling is legitimate, and of the 1% that's forged, only a small fraction of the buyers will ever find out. On the rare occasion it blows up, they can apologize and settle for an amount much less than what it would take to investigate every specimen with great zeal.
"Heritage Capital Corp. and Numismatic Certification Institute. Also named in the action were Steve Ivy and James Halperin, prominent numismatic figures. A consent order was signed agreeing to establish a $1.2-million fund for collectors who purchase the NCI-graded coins from Coin Galleries Inc. of Miami."
https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13534/
History both repeats and rhymes, in this case.