As Pokémon cards continue to see huge success, one part of the hobby that’s more popular than ever is getting your cards graded. TCG products are more of a financial asset than ever in some markets, and PSA-graded cards can fetch hefty sums over an ungraded single. One Baltimore man has filed a lawsuit against the grading service, alleging that PSA manipulates the market and deceives hobbyists.
While the lawsuit focuses primarily on the sports card market, the Pokémon TCG is one of PSA’s biggest segments. PSA’s own population report, which covers all trading card games including Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering, lists more than 38 million items graded. GemRate’s live dashboard puts PSA’s trailing 30-day grading volume at around 1.6 million TCG cards as of 30th July.
Nicholas Funk, the man who filed the lawsuit, alleges that PSA manipulates the market, stating that “[PSA] participates in the pricing, custody, resale, offers, lending, insurance, financing, liquidity, and marketplace pathways tied to those same cards.” The suit names two defendants: Collectors Universe, Inc. (trading as PSA) and its parent, Collectors Holdings, Inc. It also points to Collectors’ acquisitions of rival graders SGC in 2024 and Beckett, agreed in December 2025, as evidence of how much of the grading market it now controls.
According to Funk’s lawsuit, PSA is supposed to use experts to determine a card’s grade, scored between one and ten, the latter being the elusive “Gem Mint” grade. The suit leans on PSA’s own past disclosures, including a 2019 filing in which it admitted grading experts were “in short supply” and that it relied on training young graders and outside contractors during busy periods, to argue that PSA’s workforce never matched its “expert grader” marketing, and that this was never made clear to customers paying for that expertise.
The lawsuit makes a particularly serious allegation about the Gem Mint population, claiming the company manages the number of cards receiving the grade. It argues that a grading limit “is not and cannot be an objective determination. It is not even a good-faith subjective opinion. It is a commercially managed output, calculated to preserve scarcity, support pricing, and extract fees from the market that PSA created and from which Defendants themselves benefit downstream.”
The complaint argues that PSA’s reported populations could influence the perceived scarcity, and therefore value, of graded cards, describing Gem Mint populations as “controlled outputs, not neutral reflections of card condition.”
For Pokémon collectors, there’s a particularly interesting example in the complaint that you may already have seen doing the rounds online. In December 2025, PSA drew backlash after regrading a batch of Pokémon cards it had bought from a submitter at PSA 9 prices through an instant offer, then reselling them as Gem Mint 10s. PSA’s explanation at the time, relayed by business partner Geoff Wilson, was that a secondary review was triggered by the submitter’s “ratio of cards submitted” without receiving a single perfect grade. Funk’s lawsuit leans hard on that explanation: if a card’s grade is meant to reflect its own condition alone, it argues, then how many other cards were in the same batch shouldn’t matter at all.
There’s also a connection worth flagging here. The lawsuit notes that GameStop became an authorised PSA dealer in November 2024, and that Nat Turner, Collectors’ chief executive and chairman, sits on GameStop’s board of directors, something GameStop disclosed itself in a 2025 filing. PSA’s parent also runs the PSA Vault, which lets collectors list graded cards for sale through PSA’s own eBay storefront for a fee, alongside its own price guide and Card Ladder, its valuation platform.
“Plaintiff alleges that PSA manages gem-mint populations (PSA’s highest score) by training ratio-based grading practices, heightened scrutiny of cards that feature premium players or characters, and other concealed grading practices,” the lawsuit reads. In other words, the lawsuit alleges that PSA’s highest grades aren’t simply determined by the condition of individual cards, but can be influenced by the wider population.
If the allegations ultimately hold up, however, they could raise some uncomfortable questions about how collectors value PSA-graded Pokémon cards across decades of sets. As the lawsuit puts it, “small differences in condition can translate into substantial differences in value. The grade has become the market’s shorthand for value.”
So, what does this mean for your existing PSA-graded collection? Right now, not a lot. This is a proposed class action, meaning nothing has actually been certified by a court, and it was only filed on Tuesday, 28th July, in the District Federal Court for Maryland. PSA and Collectors haven’t yet responded to the allegations, and none of the claims above have been proven. You can read the full 188-page filing here.
We’ve reached out to PSA for comment.
