Thieves Took Nearly $1 Million in PSA Slabs Off a FedEx Truck
Someone broke into the truck in Santa Ana as it carried freshly graded cards back to collectors. One of them says his 104-card order alone was worth more than $100,000.
On Tuesday, Oct. 13, someone broke the lock on a FedEx truck parked outside PSA's shipping site in Santa Ana, Calif., while the driver was away for 60 to 90 minutes, The Athletic reported. The thieves took two pallets of about 100 packages each and pulled about 50 more packages off a third pallet. Those roughly 250 packages held graded sports cards, Pokémon cards and other collectibles.
Santa Ana police put the loss at $963,000 and say the total could climb once the rest of the boxes are scanned. Police spokesperson Natalie Garcia told NBC News the case remains open. "We have not made any arrests or recovered any stolen goods," she said.
PSA said in a statement to IGN on Monday that it's working with police and FedEx on the investigation. "We understand the impact this has on collectors involved, many of whom see these cards as far more than a financial asset," the company said.
The theft came a day after three people broke through a shared wall into Crown Cards in Phoenix and took about $70,000 in cards, azfamily reported.
Thieves have also robbed card shops in Burbank, Simi Valley and Anaheim since last December. Here's every card shop robbery we've tracked.
One collector lost two years of cards in one order
Skyler, a Michigan collector who runs the YouTube channel SKY-B Cards, spent two years building a 104-card submission of case hits and 1-of-1s. He paid $8,468 in grading fees and insured the return shipment for up to $156,000, The Athletic reported. Instead of his slabs, he got an alert at home that no shipment was coming.
He told CBS Los Angeles he had planned to sell about half of the cards and keep the rest. "There are many irreplaceable cards in here that I will never see again," he said in a YouTube video on Monday.
Nick Andrews, who posts as Boston Card Hunter, has been building a list on X of the cards victims say were taken. NBC News cited his count of 383 items by Monday evening, along with his report that one victim lost about $500,000 in cards.
PSA pays no more than the insured value you picked
PSA's statement says its customer service team has contacted affected customers directly and is arranging payment based on fair market value. In an email SKY-B shared on X, PSA told those customers it will also refund their grading fees and pay no more than the Maximum Insured Value each customer picked for a card. SKY-B told CBS Los Angeles he had heard of early offers that were "insultingly low."
On Monday, PSA offered one victim $4,223 for 169 cards, grading and shipping fees included, according to emails Boston Card Hunter posted on X. That works out to about $25 a card. The collector wrote back that his fees on the order alone came to $4,997 and that he values the cards at about $20,000, with several that came back as the only copy PSA has graded at that grade.
PSA's offer comes with a release that includes a confidentiality provision. He said he won't sign it until PSA sends a card-by-card valuation, which its email said was attached but wasn't.
When you submit to PSA, set each card's insured value at what it sells for today, because that number is the most PSA will pay if the order never makes it home. For a 1-of-1, base it on recent sales of the closest numbered parallel and save screenshots of those sales with your submission records.
Numbered cards are the easiest stolen slabs to trace
PSA has deactivated the cert numbers on the stolen slabs and told marketplace partners to watch for rare and serialized items. A deactivated cert shows up as soon as a buyer looks the slab up on PSA's site. A thief who cracks the card out and sells it raw gets around that, but a numbered card still carries its serial number for a buyer to check against a victim's list.
For the next few weeks, check the serial number on any numbered card from a recent PSA order against Boston Card Hunter's list before you buy it. Pass on a raw high-end card when the seller can't tell you why it left its slab.
Police got back 52 of 54 cards stolen in Ohio in 2024
In April 2024, a hotel employee in Strongsville, Ohio, stole a FedEx package of 54 vintage baseball cards worth $2.1 million that Memory Lane had shipped to the Best Western where he worked, ahead of a sports card conference next door. After police found 52 of the cards in a Cleveland home on May 23, the employee pleaded guilty and got four to six years in prison, Cleveland 19 reported. A 1909 Ramly Walter Johnson and a 1941 Ted Williams were never found.
Santa Ana police ask anyone with information on the truck theft to call 714-245-8665.