Can PSA Enforce Its New Policy On Kurt’s Card Care?

If you thought you had heard the last about the epic tale of Kurt’s Card Care and PSA, then think again.

There are further developments as the grading company tries to tackle the scourge of using these chemical solutions on cards intended for grading.

PSA has banned its use more clearly than ever.

But can they detect it? How much do they want to detect it? We have the whole story as we ask: can PSA enforce its new policy on Kurt’s Card Care?

What Is Kurt’s Card Care?

Kurt’s Card Care is a form of “card juice.” That is a nickname some people use for any cleaning spray or product that helps remove smudges, external paint, or any other imperfection from cards without damaging them.

Kurt’s Card Care is the most successful company in this kind of business.

The company boasts that it “does not stay on the card. You remove it, and when you do, it removes the minor issues that affect the card surface. My products are great at removing anything that happens to be on the cards and get them back to a factory-like finish when possible.” 

The product has gained a strong reputation because it works. It will clean most stains and imperfections on cards. But things started to get controversial when it became clear that some very valuable cards had been cleaned with Kurt’s Card Care, and they didn’t care who knew it.

PSA has changed its grading standards on Kurt’s Card Care

PSA’s recent change in its grading standards is a significant development. The company has specifically addressed what they consider “evidence of cleaning.” This change is crucial as it directly impacts the grading process. The previous criteria read:

“When a whitener is used to whiten borders or a solution is used to remove wax, candy, gum or tobacco stains. Note that this designation can qualify for encapsulation as “Authentic Altered” at the grader’s discretion and if “AA” is listed on the submission form as the desired minimum grade. You will be charged the applicable grading fee in either case.”

The company has added a sentence to that criteria: “Additionally, when any foreign substance is applied to the surface of a card, such as a cleaning spray or wax.”

That should clear up, at least in theory, any ambiguity about whether the various cleaning solutions are cleared for use by PSA.

The controversy surrounding PSA’s Grading Standards

The Twitter account of Sergio Villasenor, the founder of an e-commerce brand, called out PSA for not decertifying cards known to have been treated with Kurt’s Card Care. He wrote:

 “If Kurt’s Card Care is prohibited based on your Terms & Conditions, why are you not deactivating the Wemby 1/1s that you graded a 10? Attached is a video, in the Collector/PSA building, of the card owner, or cleaner, admitting & giving Kurt a shoutout.

Given that you have set a precedent that if the public, or if the public can provide evidence of tampering, you will retroactively deactivate a grade. So why are you not deactivating Serial #88489182? Moreover, your CEO admits that initially, PSA found no tampering. However, PSA also did not find tampering with Kurt’s; it was only insinuated privately & then “after the fact” removed retroactively, from an outsider & not PSA themselves. This is a double standard.

Moreover, “altering” is a card attribute or property, similar to “centering.” So, if I go back to each high-end PSA serial and find that they are not “centered” by your Terms & Conditions (i.e., 55/45 to 60/40), will you retroactively deactivate those grades, too?”

This complaint and others have led PSA to decertify the cards in question. It later led to them changing the policy on soaking cards and trying to detect them with better technology.

Why questions remain surrounding PSA’s policy towards Kurt’s Card Care

Those who have accused PSA of being soft on users of Kurt’s Card Care products will be glad they have done something about the problem. However, that does not necessarily solve the problem. After all, the real question is whether or not PSA can even identify the proper use of these products.

The short answer is we don’t know yet. Indeed, the evidence shows that they have allowed a bunch of cards treated with Kurt’s Card Care products to fall through the cracks. The only evidence we will have that something has changed is if PSA begins identifying cards treated with this stuff as “Authentic Altered.”

The Folks at Neo Cards seem to doubt that PSA can detect Kurt’s Card Care. They used a metaphor I liked: “You know how some people put a security sign for ADT Security on the front lawn so people will move on and not mess with them? This feels like having the sign on the front lawn without having the security system set up.”

Why is it difficult to detect Kurt’s Card Care Products

I share these suspicions. We don’t know exactly what Kurt’s Card Care includes in their products, which is information they do their best not to share. But it seems to be made of “natural products.” That is at least what it says on the website.

There has been some speculation about the products and their ingredients. The most popular theory is that they are made of distilled water and Isopropyl alcohol. That could make it difficult to detect and would explain some of the problems they have had with letting self-proclaimed Kurt’s Card Care use cards through with PSA 10s.

What is PSA doing to Detect Kurt’s Card Care?

A month ago, PSA announced that it was developing its ability to detect Kurt’s Card Care and similar products.

Hoge Tweeted, “I want to clarify: PSA does not approve of any chemicals or foreign substances being added to the surface of a card to improve the condition or appearance. If we detect this has happened to any card, we will consider it altered.”

Later, he clarified, “We don’t know what these things do. So, if someone is putting car wax on the surface of their cards, what happens to the surface of that card in ten years? It’s in the PSA holder, and we said it’s a PSA 10, and then suddenly all these cracks appear, and they say, hey, this is not a PSA 10, I want my money. We don’t have good proof of what happens to these things when you alter them.”

He added, “There are older cards where people do stain removal, and the stains come back. But if those stains reappear, we are on the hook.”

But he did leave the door open, saying that if it were clear that these products didn’t harm the cards, “maybe we would have a different opinion.”

As for the ability to detect these substances, Hoge said that “some of these substances leave a smell. Some of them leave a residue. We are working on detecting this using other methods, not just sight and smell.”

This interview was given just a month ago. And Hoge did not seem very confident in detecting Kurt’s Card Care. Therefore, we doubt they can detect any of this right now.

The relevance of PSA grader notes to policy On Kurt’s Card Care

Speaking of things that PSA is working on, Last month, Hoge said they would be rolling out a new feature, “hopefully in June,” to deal with the problem of grading consistency.

He said that it would help customers know why their cards got the grades that they got. A bit like your professor would give you notes on your essays in college. The goal is “giving customers more transparency and education because they might often miss something.

Hoge said that when you go into your account on PSA, a little pop-up will appear for your card explaining why grades were lowered.

These will be rolled out only at the higher service tiers, express level or higher. But Hoge said, “If it proves popular, we would like to make it available at the other service levels.”

By the way, it is worth noting that while PSA is acting as if they are doing us all some considerable favor, CGC has been doing this with comics for years. Customers pay good money for this service; if anything, the fact that they have been getting away with arbitrary grades for so long is outrageous.

Interestingly, Hoge says that PSA has been doing this for four months. The interview took place in May, meaning it has been since January. That means we could see what their graders made of some of these cards treated with Kurt’s Card Care.

Keeping grader’s notes private

However, PSA does not want people to see them. First of all, it seems they have delayed the launch. We are almost at the end of June and have not seen these Grader Notes. Second, the language in the terms and conditions is surprisingly restrictive and vaguely threatening:

“Customer will have no rights to use any of the Grader Notes except for Customer’s personal use, and Customer may not, whether or not through a third party, directly or indirectly publish, publicly display, recreate, sublicense, or create derivative works from any of the Grader Notes in any manner whatsoever without the prior written consent of PSA.”

They also include the more standard disclaimer: “Therefore, PSA makes no warranty or representation and shall have no liability whatsoever to Customer for any opinion rendered, grade assigned, or statement made (including Grader Notes as defined in Section 23, below) by PSA concerning any item. Any Grader Notes PSA may provide are intended for illustrative purposes only and are not meant as exhaustive documentation of the grading services.”

The problem is that they are concerned that social media will be filled with people analyzing the notes and making PSA look ridiculous. But they are not going to be able to prevent that from happening. How could they?

Is PSA going to sue every person who reveals the grader notes? This isn’t a top-secret CIA document. I doubt the grading company has a leg to stand on. It would also serve to alienate their customer base.

The potential for using Kurt’s Card Care with grading notes

If PSA has a foolproof way of detecting the use of Kurt’s Card Care or similar products, there shouldn’t be a problem here. But if they can’t, and there is a good chance that is the case, this will help those using it.

You can take a card that was graded down because of dirt or other cleanable imperfections and resubmit it. They disclosed that after cracking it out of the slack and targeting the imperfections,

If you could pull up this info for a listing on eBay or the floor at a card show, it would be very tempting to use that info to bump up valuable cards by a grade or two. Cleaning up comic books and using the grading notes is considered completely legitimate in the comic book space. Therefore, it happens all the time.

We need transparency from PSA

Ryan Hoge said the goal behind releasing the grading notes is “giving customers more transparency and education because they might often miss something.”

If that is the real goal, PSA is not transparent about any issues we discuss. We still don’t know if the grading company can detect the use of Kurt’s Card Care and other similar products.

Meanwhile, PSA is also not allowing us access to the grading notes (when they start using them). It is also unfair that grading notes are only provided to submissions on the more expensive end.

They are an essential service and serve the transparency PSA aims to provide. Finally, trying to stop users from sharing their grading notes is the opposite of the transparency PSA says they wish to promote.

The reasons there is no transparency here have to do with PSA’s interests. They do not help the consumers, though this is the policy’s stated goal.

As Neon Cards & Comics says, “From the consumer side of things, I don’t see the cons to graders’ notes being public. It’s never been a problem in the comic book world.”

Can PSA enforce its new policy On Kurt’s Card Care? Final thoughts

PSA is now saying that using card juice on submissions is not allowed. The trouble is that they most likely cannot detect it. So far, they have only shown the ability to do so when people admit to using it.

This means we may find that the wrong people are punished through false positives, while those who know what they are doing are not. This goes along with a lack of transparency on the grading notes, which can help those using Kurt’s Card Care locate imperfections.

This is all concerning. It doesn’t seem like PSA has a plan here.