Nearly $1 Million in Graded Cards Vanished From a FedEx Truck at PSA

Two pallets of cards, sitting on a FedEx truck outside the company that grades them. That is where more than 6,400 collectibles disappeared, and every one of them belongs to somebody who paid to have it slabbed.

Professional Sports Authenticator, the grading company better known as PSA, reported the theft to the Santa Ana Police Department on October 13. According to NBC Los Angeles, police announced it on October 19 and put the estimated value at $963,000 at the time. Two pallets of Pokémon and sports cards were taken, and PSA said a third pallet was disrupted. Police said the exact value can’t be pinned down until the remaining boxes are scanned.

Since then the picture has gotten bigger. Dexerto reports that the FBI is now investigating alongside Santa Ana police, and that PSA has handed both agencies video footage, shipment manifests and item-level records. PSA also published a list of the stolen items as a PDF. It runs to 6,451 entries, taken from more than 200 packages on the truck.

Here’s what matters at the table, or at the card show. PSA says it has deactivated the certification numbers on every stolen graded item and passed the list to marketplace sellers, auction houses and digital platforms. In plain terms, a PSA label on one of these cards no longer vouches for anything. If you buy slabs, and especially high-end Pokémon or sports cards, check the cert number against that list before you hand over money. A seller who says “it just came out of a collection” has not told you anything useful.

The people hurt most are the customers. YouTuber and trader SKY-B Cards told NBC he lost 104 cards he’d spent two years collecting. He said he paid $8,000 in grading fees and that his cards were insured for up to $156,000, which he believes is below their likely market value. That gap is worth noticing for anyone who ships cards in for grading. Insurance and fair market value are not always the same number.

PSA says it is contacting affected customers directly, has refunded grading fees, and will pay compensation based on fair market value without waiting for the investigation to finish. The company says the fee refunds are separate and do not reduce the compensation. That is the right call, and it’s also the part we can’t judge yet. We haven’t seen a single payout, and market value on one-of-a-kind cards is exactly where disputes tend to start. FedEx has said only that shipment security is a top priority and that it is working with local police.

Nobody has been arrested. Anyone with information can reach the Santa Ana Police Department at 714-245-8665.

If you keep graded cards at home, this is a good week to look at how you store and show them. A wall frame that fits PSA slabs, like this Bivitre graded card display frame, at least keeps the cert number in front of you instead of in a drawer.

This is still an open case. We’ll check back on arrests, recovered cards and whether PSA’s compensation reaches the people who are owed it.

Header image: Photo by Caleb Oquendo, via Pexels.