TCG and Marketplace Fraud: The September 2026 Briefing

Trading card fraud is now measured, and it is large

PSA's first public fraud report, covered by Sports Illustrated, says the grader intercepted more than $200 million of counterfeit and altered collectibles in 2025, a 45.3 percent increase year over year, with Pokemon making up 56.3 percent of counterfeits and card alteration up 108.7 percent. PSA president Ryan Hoge put the true size at well north of a billion dollars, and flagged the $100 to $300 band as the new target because that is where buyers stop checking.

The demand explains the supply. CNN Business reported buyers spent $450 million on cards in January 2026 with values up 145 percent year over year, and more than $500,000 of cards stolen in the first quarter across the US, Canada, and the UK. In September, InvestigateTV+ took the counterfeit story to local news nationwide. Stolen inventory gets sold in the same place fakes do: online, by a seller using someone else's name.

Marketplace regulation caught up in the same year

The European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million under the Digital Services Act for failing to mitigate the risk of illegal and unsafe products, noting its commitments lacked external verification mechanisms, two months after a €200 million Temu fine on the same grounds. In the US, the FTC's first INFORM Consumers Act case cost Temu $2 million for failing to collect and verify high-volume seller information.

All three enforcement tracks converge on one requirement: the marketplace must know who its sellers are, verify it, and prove it. That is seller identity verification with liveness, one-to-many dedupe against banned sellers, and a verified payout account, the stack the marketplaces solution runs behind one API.