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PSA and Collectors now face three lawsuits, two of them alleging fraud

Collectors' PSA/SGC/Beckett rollup is now defending three separate suits, none decided.

Cardboard JournalOur analysis

This site's argument has always been that a grade is only worth what the market trusts in the company issuing it. These three suits attack that trust from three different directions rather than repeating one claim. Rasmussen says consolidation itself lets Collectors raise prices and slow service without competitive discipline — and the amended complaint puts numbers on it: SGC's cheapest tier from $15 to $18, its monthly volume cut from roughly 150,000 to 50,000 cards. Those are checkable operational claims, not opinion, and worth verifying independently if they surface in an actual filing rather than a summary of one. Funk's suit goes after the grading itself, down to a specific certification number on a T206 Honus Wagner. Lichtman's is different in kind: not a service complaint but a conflict-of-interest claim, that grades can be steered to protect cards held by Collectors' own CEO. None of this has been proven, and Collectors has pushed back specifically on Lichtman's version. But together they are the first sustained legal challenge to the "grade is an expert opinion" framing PSA uses publicly, arriving while Collectors already controls roughly 80% of grading volume across PSA, SGC and Beckett — the concentration this site's Ownership fields have carried since the CBJ-74 finding.

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