Overview
- PSA, which released its first Fraud Report Thursday, said it identified more than $200 million in counterfeit and altered trading cards in 2025.
- The company reported a 45.3% year-over-year rise in counterfeit and altered submissions and said counterfeit Pokémon jumped 125% while altered Pokémon cards spiked 407.2%.
- Pokémon now dominates fraud patterns, with six of the 10 most faked characters — including Charizard, Pikachu, Gengar, Rayquaza, Umbreon and Mewtwo — appearing most often on counterfeits.
- PSA says counterfeiters are moving beyond only high-end grails to lower-priced, mid-tier and promotional cards that are easier to pass with casual buyers.
- To catch fakes, PSA uses AI trained on a large reference library and multi-layer human grading through its Grader University program, processes about 20 million cards a year, and plans to publish fraud data annually.