Fake PSA labels pass the cert lookup most slab buyers trust

AliExpress stores are selling PSA-style front and back labels with an empty case to slide a card into. Type the number from one of the labels in buyers' review photos into PSA's cert lookup and you get a real card at a real grade. CheckCOA founder Roman Pioneer traced the kits on Nov. 8 after collectors in Japan posted them on X. Three of the six numbers he traced belong to a 2000 Team Rocket Dark Gyarados Prerelease PSA 10 and a 2024 Paldean Fates Mew ex PSA 9, plus a Japanese One Piece OP06 Roronoa Zoro manga alt art PSA 10. In a video, collectibles commentator Max Long showed a listing for the kits at about $4 with more than 5,000 sold.

You should always check a slab by typing its number into PSA's site and matching the card name and grade to the listing. Both schemes going around this week are built to pass that check. A copy label with a real number returns a real record. So does a genuine label pulled out of its case. A seller on a Japanese flea-market app sold a bundle of three PSA, two Beckett, and three ARS labels for 6,800 yen, with a PSA 10 and two BGS 10s among the five numbers CheckCOA could read. PSA has deactivated two of the six copied numbers, the same step it took on the 6,451 items on its stolen list in October. The Zoro number was still active when CheckCOA looked it up. PSA's 2025 fraud report already ranked Pokémon first among the counterfeit cards sent to PSA, with fake Pokémon cards up 125% from the year before.

Vintage is where I'd look hardest. PSA said in February 2023 that it now photographs every card it grades. The copied numbers for the Mew ex, the Dark Gyarados, and the Zoro all open PSA pages with photos of the exact cards behind them. You can hold a slab up against those and compare the centering, print lines, and edge wear. Many older certs have no photos at all. The Dark Gyarados Prerelease PSA 10 at the top of this page, listed on eBay since Nov. 6, carries an older cert whose PSA page shows nothing but text. On a slab like that, the card name and the grade are the only things to match. A copy label gets both right.

PSA bought the machine-vision company Genamint in 2021 and said it would fingerprint each card it grades to track it. TAG prints a QR code on its slabs that opens the card's digital grading report, along with what it calls Proof security features you check with a phone. A PSA label is printed, number and all. Anything printed can be copied. Ticketing ran into the same wall with screenshotted barcodes. A screenshot of a Ticketmaster SafeTix ticket won't scan because the barcode refreshes every 15 seconds inside the app. When a fan transfers a ticket, the buyer gets a new barcode and the seller's copy stops working.

A slab could work the same way, with a chip in the case that answers each scan with a code no printer can fake and ownership that moves to the buyer in PSA's app when the slab sells.

A cert claimed by two people at once would flag itself. The chip would prove the case is real, while PSA's photos would still have to prove the card inside it.

Until PSA builds something like that, I wouldn't pay PSA 10 money for a vintage slab whose card I can't match to PSA's own photos of that cert. On an older cert with no photos, I'd buy it through eBay's Authenticity Guarantee, where PSA inspects the case and label of a graded card that sells for $200 or more in the U.S. before it ships, or I'd pass.