A FedEx Truck Full of Graded Cards Was Robbed. It's the Tip of a Much Bigger Problem.

On October 17, PSA began emailing collectors with news nobody wants: a FedEx vehicle carrying graded card orders out of its Southern California facility had been burglarized. One collector says his entire 104-card submission, which he values at over $100,000, is gone.

PSA confirmed the burglary to affected customers, deactivated the stolen certification numbers, alerted marketplaces and auction houses, and says it is working with FedEx and law enforcement. What it has not disclosed: the date, the location, the number of affected orders, or the total value. No public police report has surfaced.

To be precise about what is verified and what is not: the $100,000 figure is the collector's valuation, not a confirmed payout. PSA compensates at fair market value, capped at the Maximum Insured Value each collector selected. A "may top $1 million" estimate circulating online is one publication's math, not a verified total.

The Pattern

That truck was not an isolated incident. Since January I have tracked 38 card theft incidents across the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia: shops, shows, collectors, and now the mail itself.

The tactics repeat. Most hits take under two minutes. In Brentwood, California, three thieves cleared $15,000 in product in 39 seconds. When alarms guard the front door, thieves tunnel: through a wall in Anaheim ($180,000 in Pokemon), through a roof, a vent, and a hallway wall in Kerman, California, through a neighboring business's drywall in Phoenix. They go straight for graded slabs and sealed product. In Chicago, thieves walked past a cash register to take over $100,000 in cards.

The Scale

The largest case with hard numbers is not the FedEx truck. It is an August burglary in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin: $310,453.64 in merchandise plus property damage, per the criminal complaints. Five men were charged; one is in custody on $50,000 bail.

January brought a $300,000 gunpoint robbery outside a Los Angeles shop and a $116,000 armed robbery in New York. In Ontario, police tied 36 incidents between June and September to a single crew running ram raids with stolen vehicles. The task force, called Project Magenta, ended with more than 200 charges filed.

What This Means

Three practical takeaways. First, deactivated cert numbers only go so far: a cracked slab makes a card anonymous, so diligence on provenance matters more than ever for high-end raw purchases. Second, declared insured value caps payouts, so underinsuring a submission to save on grading fees is self-insurance against exactly this kind of risk. Third, shipment method is part of the risk model. PSA lists armored carriers as an option, and a standard parcel truck carrying potentially seven figures in slabs is a vulnerability, not a plan.

When an asset class gets valuable enough to steal professionally, the infrastructure around it has to grow up. The hobby is there now.

See the free report here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I_XanHXD6dBPPHlph-xBUpgWVLolnBZG/view?usp=sharing

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Pokémon TCG (2023)

Set: Paradox Rift 139/182

Illustration: takuyoa

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Pokémon TCG (2020)

Set: Champion’s Path 075/073

Illustrator: aky CG Works

eBay Is About to Kill the Snipe. That Might Be the Most Dangerous Thing It Has Ever Done to Your Wallet.

For thirty years, winning an eBay auction meant one thing. You waited, you watched, and in the last three seconds, you struck.

eBay has been testing something called extended bidding since July 2025. If it goes everywhere, the snipe is dead. And the twist nobody is talking about is that killing the snipe might cost collectors more money, not less.

How It Works

Right now, an eBay auction ends when the clock hits zero. Bid one second before the end and it still ends. Under extended bidding, a bid placed in the final two minutes resets the clock by two minutes. Bid during those two minutes and it resets again. The auction does not close until a full two-minute window passes with no bids.

This is called a soft close, and it is the industry standard everywhere except eBay. Sotheby's does it. Heritage does it. Goldin does it. eBay started piloting it on trading cards in July 2025. Australia got the full rollout across every category this past August. A global rollout is widely expected within the next year or so.

Why People Snipe (It Is Not the Reason You Think)

Researchers have studied auction sniping for decades, and the findings are counterintuitive. About thirty percent of eBay bidders are what academics call naive incremental bidders: they get outbid and reflexively bid again, over and over, as if they were in a live auction room.

The sniper's entire edge is built on those bidders. One bid in the final seconds, no time for anyone to react.

But a Caltech field experiment found that sniping saves the sniper roughly one percent. All the timing, the sniper apps, the adrenaline, for one percent.

So why does everyone do it? Control.

The research documents a fascinating non-strategic motive: a lot of snipers do not trust themselves. They know that if they bid early, they will get pulled into a bidding war and overpay. So they place one bid at the last second and walk away. No emotions, no escalation. Sniping, for these bidders, is a self-control tool disguised as a cheat code.

What Changes When the Snipe Dies

First, prices go up. When every bidder gets time to respond, the incremental bidders do what they do: keep raising. The auction converges on everyone's true maximum. Sellers benefit. Bargain hunters do not.

Second, sniper apps become useless. A last-second bid under extended bidding just restarts the clock. You did not snipe anyone. You rang the dinner bell.

Third, and most consequentially: the bidders who were using sniping as self-control just lost their tool. eBay is removing their guardrail and dropping them into the bidding war they built a whole strategy to avoid.

The Psychology Nobody Is Discussing

A fixed end time is a commitment device. The auction ends at 8pm. Win or lose, you are done.

Extended bidding removes the finish line. The auction ends when the bidding stops, which means it ends when you decide to stop. Every outbid during an extension triggers the endowment effect: you were the high bidder thirty seconds ago, the card felt like yours, and now the clock is ticking. So you bid again. Each extension is another "just one more" loop, structurally identical to the reinforcement schedule of a slot machine.

To be fair, the old system had a genuine cruelty to it. Berkeley research found that getting sniped in the final seconds drives new bidders off the platform entirely. There is a real quasi-endowment injury in watching a card you thought was yours vanish with no chance to respond. Extended bidding fixes that. It is more transparent and more fair.

But fairer and safer are not the same thing.

Where This Leaves Collectors

Extended bidding is coming, and on balance it is the right call for marketplace fairness. But collectors should go in with eyes open: the fixed deadline was quietly protecting impulse control, and its removal changes the emotional shape of every auction.

The practical advice is unchanged and always has been: decide your max before you bid, write it down, and respect it when the extensions start and the adrenaline hits.

And if bidding ever stops feeling like collecting and starts feeling like something else, that is worth paying attention to. Resources like @collectorsmd exist precisely because the platforms are engineered to keep you in the room. Knowing that is the first step.

Sources: eBay help documentation via Men's Journal and cllct (July 2025); SI Collectibles; Value Added Resource; Roth and Ockenfels (2002); Shum, Caltech field experiment on sniping; Stadelis, UC Berkeley Haas quasi-endowment study; Herrmann et al. (2013); Malmendier and Lee (2011).

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Star Wars Unlimited (2024)

Set: Twilight of the Republic 187/257

Artist: James Daly