So PSA totally damaged/ruined my card. Argh.

[inaka]

As I've shared here before, I primarily collect vintage. However, I do collect a few "modern" player cards like Ichiro and Rickey Henderson. I have completely stopped using PSA for all vintage card grading as their grading inconsistency on vintage just made grading with them pointless. So I cancelled my PSA membership, and grade only about 1 or 2 PC Cards a month with PSA as part of my player "sets" for my PC. Well, I sent PSA a really nice 1991 Donruss Elite Rickey Henderson card for grading, and I pre-graded it a PSA 9 with a really long shot at a PSA 10.

Here's the PSA pre-grading photo/URL of the card I submitted when it arrived at PSA, with an image link direct from PSA's on servers:
There's no damage to the top corners.



Well, my grades popped and this card graded a PSA 7.
I thought it was just another random PSA grade, but when I looked at the scans of the graded card, it's glaringly obvious that the top two corners of my card were totally damaged by PSA.

Here's my PSA 7 graded card.
PSA bent back and damaged both top corners, especially the top right corner:









It's as plain as day. PSA totally damaged and bent back these corners, didn't say a thing, graded/encapsulated them, and expected me not to notice? Wow. Classy. There's no way someone at PSA along the way damages these corners and doesn't notice.

I guess I need to abandon my PSA modern player "sets" and give up with grading with PSA completely. It sucks because I like consistency with my collection, and I never would have started this as a PSA graded "set" if I knew what PSA would become. Even scaling back to just 1 or 2 more modern cards a month graded by PSA doesn't make sense to me anymore since they can't grade cards properly, and clearly damage cards without saying anything. If I sent in another condition-sensitive card like this, I have no faith PSA can ever grade this without damaging it since they are just churning through cards like flipping burgers.

I wanted to share this (and rant a bit) because I had two takeaways from experiencing this that might help others:

1. Be sure to not only save the PSA pre-grading scans of your cards, but also save the PSA image URLs as well just in case. (Right-click, copy image address, and just paste them into a text document just in case.)

2. If I had submitted these orders via Gamestop, (instead of directly by me) it would likely be even more complicated to get this corrected AND I wouldn't have access to any PSA pre-scans of the cards to prove my case. There are no pre-grading scans supplied to GameStop customers. So If using GameStop, that's a risk if there's no PSA pre-grade images. PSA could also then claim that your own pre-grade photos are not accurate, even if you take them minutes before sealing up the package before shipping to PSA. Again, just a thing to keep in mind.

I have no idea how/if PSA will correct this, and it really sucks that I have to now deal with PSA's "customer service" and reach out to them, instead of them noticing the issue and contacting me first, when someone in their chain clearly knew they damaged it. So we'll see what happens I guess. I use the email form, and it says:

Due to an influx of interest, our turnaround time for resolving a request can fluctuate and is currently in excess of 5-10 business days.

"An influx of interest" in a very ChatGPT way of saying, "Due to a boatload of customer service complaints." LOL My guess? PSA will offer me compensation in the form of a $5 Chick-fil-A coupon valid only on Sundays. Argh. What a mess.

Has anyone else been in a similar situation where PSA damaged your card?