PSA lawsuits put grading power back under the microscope

The Funk case attacks PSA's trust signal

Funk's proposed class action targets the basic promise collectors think they are buying when they pay for a PSA grade: an expert, neutral opinion that can travel with the card in the market.

According to reporting from Value Added Resource, Funk seeks to represent card owners who paid PSA grading charges after submitting through dealers, card shops, or other intermediaries without using their own PSA accounts. Funk says he submitted about seven cards, including Cal Ripken Jr. rookies, through a Maryland intermediary in March 2025 and paid about $300.

The complaint accuses PSA and Collectors of marketing grading as neutral, expert, and reliable while allegedly operating a system shaped by subjective judgment, production pressure, changing criteria, financial incentives, short review windows, and undisclosed standards shifts.

One example in the complaint is PSA's first certified card, the T206 Honus Wagner with certification number 00000001. Value Added Resource reported that PSA's published standards say cards showing evidence of trimming, recoloring, restoration, or other tampering should not receive a numerical grade, while Funk alleges PSA still assigned that Wagner an NM-MT 8 despite knowing it had been trimmed.

That is a serious allegation, not a settled finding. For collectors, the practical issue is narrower: if a slab's number is treated as a market credential, any fight over how that number is assigned becomes a fight over comps, population scarcity, and buyer trust.

Collectors' wider card-market role is part of the challenge

The Funk complaint also focuses on Collectors' position beyond grading. Value Added Resource reported that Collectors owns or operates PSA, SGC, Beckett, Card Ladder, PSA Vault, PSA Partner Offers, and Collectors Financial Services.

That structure is central to the conflict-of-interest argument. PSA assigns grades and publishes population data, while other Collectors businesses touch valuation, storage, lending, acquisition, and resale. Funk argues that puts the company on several sides of grading-dependent transactions.

WMAR quoted the lawsuit saying PSA authenticates cards, assigns grades, issues certification numbers, and publishes population data, while also participating in pricing, custody, resale, offers, lending, insurance, financing, liquidity, and marketplace pathways tied to those same cards.

Collectors and PSA have not been found liable on those allegations. The collector takeaway is not that PSA slabs should be ignored. It is that slab buyers should understand how much trust the hobby places in one company's grade, population report, and brand premium.

Lichtman and Rasmussen add pressure from different angles

Funk is not the only legal pressure point. A separate lawsuit from high-end collector Steve Lichtman was filed July 21 in Orange County Superior Court and later removed to federal court in the Central District of California, according to Value Added Resource.

Lichtman alleges PSA undergraded some of his cards, refused to cross cards graded by competitors, and applied stricter standards to recent submissions while preserving older grades he says were inflated. His collection includes high-grade Honus Wagner, Mickey Mantle, and Wilt Chamberlain cards, and he claims losses exceeding $5 million.

Collectors has disputed that case. Value Added Resource reported that Collectors told The Athletic Lichtman's claims are "without merit" and said PSA would "never compromise our grading independence." The company also said a grade is an expert opinion and characterized the suit as a dispute with a collector unhappy that PSA would not assign the grades he wanted.

A third legal lane is the Rasmussen antitrust case, which Value Added Resource reported is expected to expand with new plaintiffs and allegations that Collectors weakened SGC, raised prices across its grading businesses, and reduced access to lower-cost PSA services. Collectors previously described the original antitrust suit as "long on rhetoric but devoid of substance" and defended the SGC and Beckett acquisitions as a capacity-building response to demand.

Those cases are different. Funk is framed around consumer grading fees and alleged RICO violations. Lichtman is a high-end collector dispute over grading decisions and alleged conflicts. Rasmussen is about competition, acquisitions, pricing, and market access. Together, they keep the same question in front of collectors: how much grading power can one company hold before the market starts asking harder questions?

The backlog context makes the timing sharper

The lawsuits are landing while PSA is still working through a major submission crunch. PSA's public Backlog Tracker listed 11.85 million active units as of August 11, 2026, down from 12.4 million on July 28.

That is progress, but PSA's lower-priced Value tiers remain paused. PSA announced on May 28 that it would stop accepting Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus, and Value Max submissions effective June 2 after a 20% spike in submissions pushed the active backlog toward 10 million. PSA tied reopening those tiers to reducing the backlog to 5 million units.

The current backlog story does not prove any lawsuit claim. It does show why grading access and grading trust are linked for ordinary collectors. When cheaper submission lanes are closed and turnaround estimates are stretched, the decision to grade a raw card becomes more expensive and more dependent on confidence in the final number.

For lower-end cards, that can change the math fast. A card that made sense at a Value price may not make sense if the only open direct tier is much higher. For bigger cards, the issue is less about the fee and more about whether the expected grade, population count, and market premium justify the wait and risk.

What slab buyers should do now

The legal cases do not erase PSA comps. PSA slabs remain one of the core pricing languages of the hobby, and buyers will still use PSA 9 and PSA 10 sales to judge cards across eBay, live breaks, vaults, and private deals.

But the lawsuits are a reminder to read the whole market, not just the label. Check recent completed sales, population reports, comparable grades from other companies, seller history, and whether the card's premium depends on a tiny difference between grades.

Collectors submitting raw cards should also separate two decisions. First, does the card deserve grading at all based on condition and likely resale or PC value? Second, does PSA make sense right now given the open service tiers, backlog, timing, and fee structure?

The safe read is boring but useful: treat the lawsuits as active allegations, not final answers. Then use them as a prompt to be more careful with slab premiums, crossover assumptions, crack-and-resubmit math, and any purchase that only works if the market keeps treating one grading label as unquestionable.