Anthony Curcio and the Trading-Card Fraud Scandal That Rocked PSA

Seventeen years after becoming the most legendary bank robber of the internet age, Anthony Curcio was again inside a federal courtroom facing prison. It was January 17, 2026. Dressed in a casual blue suit and loose tie, the 45-year-old still possessed the handsome bad-boy charm that long had Hollywood producers after him.

Once the high school football hero of tiny Monroe, Washington, a college injury left him with a Vicodin addiction he couldn’t shake. Then, when the housing crash hit, the desperate father of two made an outlandish play: an armored-truck heist of $400,000 in cash and a getaway down the Skykomish River on an inner tube. In 2013, after serving five years in federal prison, Curcio began his redemption arc: TED talks, TV appearances, and a line of best-selling children’s books.

Now, prosecutors alleged, he had been running an elaborate new scheme: defrauding buyers in the booming $15 billion trading card industry. After a two-year FBI investigation called Operation Heist and Holder, Curcio was charged with wire fraud and conspiracy, charges that carry a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. The evidence, prosecutors said, would include texts and recordings of Curcio lying to card buyers, faking his identity, and doctoring labels of rare cards, as well as forgery tools found in his home workshop.

Curcio’s defense told a different story: The case wasn’t about fraud; it was retribution. The real villain, his attorneys argued, was Professional Sports Authenticator, the card industry’s dominant grading company. PSA is the Moody’s of the sports card world. A PSA label can mean the difference between a card worth $50 and one worth $500,000. PSA’s parent company, Collectors Holdings — which is backed, in large part, by billionaire hedge fund manager and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen — controls roughly 80% of the card grading market.

By the time of Curcio’s trial this winter, a New York congressman had demanded a Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation, writing that Collectors had “effectively dismantled market competition.” PSA soon faced a boycott by aggrieved customers over fee hikes and allegations of grade manipulation.Over several months of exclusive interviews, Curcio shared his version of events for the first time. “I don’t have nothing to hide,” he says. “Those motherfuckers got a lot to hide.”

Collectors Holdings and PSA “basically have a horizontally and vertically integrated monopoly,” says Remington Ewald, a veteran card dealer who had a fateful encounter with Curcio at an expo in Chicago. “It just sucks that the guy who’s bringing it to everybody’s attention is a criminal himself.”

Long before he was a famous outlaw, Anthony Curcio was just another one of America’s 94 million card collectors. Growing up in the tiny logging town of Monroe, he’d bike over to the Red Barn gas station and spend his allowance on the latest packs of Topps cards. As the town’s star high school athlete, he was determined to one day have his face featured on his own card.

PSA offered a simple premise: that a card examined by an expert and graded a number was worth more than a card pulled from a shoebox.

A nimble wide receiver, Curcio went to the University of Idaho on a full scholarship. Then he tore his ACL, and became addicted to painkillers. To support his habit, he faked prescriptions and ran a side hustle buying and selling trading cards online. He quickly learned there was one company at the heart of the trade.

Founded in 1991 by card dealer David Hall, PSA offered a simple premise: that a card examined by an expert and graded a number was worth more than a card pulled from a shoebox. Collectors would mail their cards to the company, and trained graders would evaluate each one across four criteria — centering, edges, corners, and surface — and assign it a numerical grade from 1 (Poor) to 10 (Gem Mint). The card was then sealed in a clear, tamper-evident plastic case called a slab, with a label bearing the grade and a unique certification number tied to PSA’s database. The company charged per submission, and the model was self-reinforcing. “Once the buyers insisted on it,” Hall said in 2019, “the dealers had no choice.”

In a statement to Business Insider, a PSA spokesperson wrote, “For more than thirty years, PSA has served collectors by authenticating, grading, and protecting items so that collectors can trade with confidence. In our view, that trusted role is precisely why people try to counterfeit our labels and holders.” The spokesperson added that “last year alone, our systems intercepted roughly $200 million in potential counterfeit value before it reached the market.”

Curcio fled with $400,000, and then spent weeks blowing cash on cars and gambling.

In the trading card community’s burgeoning online forums, Curcio made a name for himself — as an alleged fraudster. In 2005, participants on the Trading & Memorabilia discussion thread began warning of the “Seattle boy” attempting to sell a fake 1953 Mickey Mantle. “Anyone on this board get ripped off by this guy??” one user wrote. Curcio denied everything. But in his 2013 memoir, “Heist and High,” Curcio wrote about his early card-dealing days in ways that would come back to haunt him. He shared how, after being defrauded out of $12,000 by a con man who reversed a PayPal payment, he got his money back by listing a counterfeit Mantle of his own and pocketing $20,000 from buyers who never got the card. He also detailed learning to trim cards for better centering, yellow them with coffee grounds to fake aging, and crack open sealed PSA cases to swap in higher-grade cards.

After college, Curcio returned to Monroe to marry his high school sweetheart, Emily, and found success flipping houses. When the real estate bubble burst in 2007, he burned through his life savings, and his house went into foreclosure. He found painkillers again. He couldn’t support his habit or his family. One day, while eating a hamburger in his car outside a Jack in the Box, he watched an armored truck pull into the Bank of America. It was just another bank, he thought, that had robbed him and millions of Americans. So he felt justified when he decided to rob it.

Curcio spent months planning the heist, testing on himself the bear spray he’d mist the security guard with, and gaming out escape plans of varying risk — a getaway car (too conspicuous), a jet ski down the river (too shallow) — before settling on the seemingly most outlandish, yet practical, option: a black-and-yellow inner tube festooned with a decal of a hornet. For added cover, he took out a Craigslist help-wanted ad, telling prospective workers to show up in the park across from the bank dressed in matching landscaper vests. It worked. He fled with $400,000, and then spent weeks blowing cash on cars and gambling.

But a homeless man in Monroe had witnessed Curcio on a dry run of the heist, and gave the local cops Curcio’s license plate number. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison in Big Spring, Texas.

That’s where I first met with Curcio in 2009, for a GQ story about the heist. He told me then that the robbery wasn’t about money, it was about feeling like he needed to be the big man on campus once again. Getting locked up was the first time he’d felt free of that lie.

He echoed this sentiment to me in October 2025, when we sat in a Jersey City hotel café the day before his trading card fraud hearing began. Wearing a zipped-up blue windbreaker and a backward cap, he looked more like a suburban little-league coach than a wizened bank robber. “I was concerned with materialistic shit because I didn’t feel good about who I was,” he told me about what led to the heist. “I wish I could have calmed down and realized, ‘Yes, I got bills, but none of this really is that big a deal.'”

After he was released in 2013, Curcio threw himself into a great American comeback. Back with his family, he became an active youth basketball, baseball, and softball coach. He was “the happiest and most content I’ve been ever,” he tells me. While in prison, he’d written and illustrated “My Daddy’s In Jail,” trying to explain incarceration to young children, including his own. Then he wrote another book about Steph Curry, which the NCAA selected for a nationwide reading program. Suddenly, Curcio went from making $200 a month to $16,000. Some months, he says, he made more than $100,000.

He bought a local gym, but after tiring of the business, he decided to sell it. The buyer happened to be a card collector, who threw in boxes of valuable cards as part of the gym-sale deal — including a 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card graded PSA 10, Gem Mint. “I ended up taking tons of cards in on, like, a credit,” Curcio tells me, “to keep the fucking tax amount down.”

It was a fortuitous time to come into a card collection. During COVID, the sports trading card business exploded in value, joining a pandemic gold rush in other collectibles like Lego sets, rare whiskey, and luxury watches. With collectors stuck at home, and cryptocurrency fattening their bank accounts, they began pouring their money into cards — which swelled as much as 10 times in worth.

Curcio’s Gem Mint ’86 Jordan was worth about $39,000 when he received it in January 2020. In January 2021, two sold for $720,000 each. As the first widely distributed licensed NBA card to feature Jordan, it became, as PSA described it in its CardFacts database, “the most important modern card from any sport in the entire hobby.” That same year, a group of private equity investors — which included hedge fund magnates Daniel Sundheim and Steven Cohen — took Collectors private in a deal worth roughly $853 million.

Flush with money, the company rapidly expanded. It acquired Goldin Auctions, where the cards were sold. It struck a partnership with eBay, handling authentication for the platform’s high-value transactions. It acquired rival card grader SGC. It bought the Long Beach Expo, the primary venue where the deals were made, and where every card that passed through it needed PSA’s blessing to be worth anything at all.

PSA’s practices had already been under scrutiny. In 2019, one of the biggest scandals in the trading card hobby’s history broke open. Collectors accused a buyer of purchasing cards already graded by PSA, then secretly trimming their edges and resubmitting them to PSA for a higher grade — evidence, they said, that PSA’s own process had failed. Trimming a card’s edges by a fraction of a millimeter could transform a PSA 7 into a PSA 9, multiplying its value. The buyer was accused of making hundreds of thousands of dollars this way through an Oregon-based marketplace called PWCC. The FBI subpoenaed PWCC. No charges were filed. In June 2019, Collectors Universe CEO Joe Orlando wrote in a letter to customers that expecting perfection from “human-based opinion services is simply unattainable.”

The stress of COVID, parenting, and battling a lifetime of addiction was taking a toll on Curcio. He began spending hours a day in his basement, building an elaborate Lego city. Long suffering from OCD, he found that the bricks soothed him. His obsessions also soon turned to the card market. Given the rarity and value of the Gem Mint ’86 Jordan, Curcio decided to take a shot at selling it on the highest-end market he knew: Sotheby’s. To be accepted, he had to clear an elaborate verification process. This included ownership records and approximately two dozen photographs of the card taken to precise specifications, several of them under black lights.

On September 12 2021, Eric Hirsch, a Sotheby’s specialist in its Modern Collectibles division, emailed Curcio the good news: The Jordan had been verified and approved for an upcoming auction. Though prices had fallen from their early COVID peak, Hirsch estimated a listing between $150,000 and $200,000. “We certainly believe the sale price could go higher depending on the market,” he wrote. Hirsch did not return requests to comment.

On May 19, the $168,059.33 refund was complete. Curcio thought giving back the money would make the trouble go away.

The auction was still seven months away, and Curcio feared the card’s value would keep falling. To hedge, he listed it on eBay for $175,000, and decided to “just see what happens,” he told me. Among the dozens of inquiries was a rival seller, Curcio says, who was asking nearly double for his own ’86 Jordan, a price Curcio called overinflated. Sotheby’s own estimate, based on its review process, was the more credible number, he maintained.

MySlabs had a rule Curcio kept breaking: covering a card’s certification number with a black box in the listing photos, so buyers couldn’t check it against PSA’s database before buying. “Nobody could check to see if the card was authentic,” Greaney tells me. His team deleted the listing once. Curcio reposted it. They deleted it again. Then, close to midnight on May 12, it went back up, and sold within minutes for $170,000. “He was hoping basically no one was awake at the wheel,” Greaney says, and “he could just sneak it through.”

He didn’t. Greaney happened to be reviewing the site that night and compared the photos in the listing to those in PSA’s own database. “The front picture was spot on,” he says, “However, the back photos were off.” It was the same trick PSA investigators would later describe at trial: someone had cracked open the case, swapped in a different card, and resealed it.

Greaney messaged Curcio to warn him: “Hold on a second, let’s pump the brakes here.” Then he called the buyer directly. But the buyer wanted to go through with it anyway. “It looks fine to me,” he told Greaney, “I checked it on the PSA website.” Four days after the sale, PSA notified Curcio and Greaney that they had determined the “label is not authentic.” At the time, the buyer’s PayPal e-check was still clearing. The buyer, Curcio says, told him he’d “rather just figure this out, then go from there,” and Curcio quickly agreed to send him a full refund. On May 19, 2022, the $168,059.33 refund was complete. Curcio thought giving back the money would make the trouble go away.

Weeks later, Curcio submitted eight of his most valuable cards to PSA for reholdering — a standard, paid service in which PSA transfers already-graded cards into updated cases without changing the grade. Curcio argues that this action proves he had nothing to hide. “I wanted there to be no dispute” about the authenticity of his cards, he tells me, “I wanted PSA to bless them.” PSA would have a different interpretation. Once Curcio mailed the cards to PSA, they kept them and, he says, went silent. Curcio maintains he had no idea what was transpiring behind the scenes.

On November 30, 2022, Roxanne Ghezzi, PSA’s product integrity manager, emailed FBI Special Agent Christopher Campbell with the subject line, “Counterfeit and Tampered PSA Cards.” She flagged Curcio’s criminal history and described him as a counterfeiting threat. Jackie Curiel, PSA’s senior director of brand protection, would later testify that PSA had physically inspected the cards Curcio sent them for reholdering, noted problems with the holders, and was deliberately withholding them as evidence for a possible case. Less than a week later, Campbell emailed eBay’s senior criminal investigator directly, looking to “partner on this investigation.”

On December 2, Curcio emailed PSA customer service again, with a threat. “Regardless of the justification for PSA’s actions in this matter, it would be unwise to believe that pursuing legal action is where this ends,” he wrote. He went on to describe what he had in mind: “Imagine a couple short 3 minute videos” capable of driving PSA’s rivals up. “It wouldn’t surprise me if networks wanted to make a documentary about the entire thing.”

Curcio took the exposé idea to filmmaker Jeremiah Murphy, who was already working on a documentary about Curcio’s bank heist and life after prison. Murphy tells me that Curcio was a man on a mission. “He was like ‘this is a corrupt industry that is taking advantage of people and stealing,” Murphy recalls, “‘and they’re wielding this powerful influence, and we’ve got to expose this.'” But evidence of the corruption fell short. “He said ‘I have proof, all this stuff,'” Murphy recalls, “but it was never sent to me.”

Curcio says that after his eBay account was flagged and his name became radioactive on MySlabs, he needed a new way to move cards. He found one through Joe Bondarchuk, a fellow youth basketball coach who was also going through a divorce. “He was always asking for help,” Curcio says. (Bonderchuck declined to comment on this story.) The arrangement was simple: Curcio provided the cards, the photos, the descriptions, and the prices. Bondarchuk listed them on his established eBay account and generated shipping labels. Curcio shipped. He says he didn’t see it as hiding, but as the only rational response to what PSA had done to him. “I want the money from these cards,” he tells me, but after what happened, “you never, ever, ever want to deal with that reputational bullshit again.”

On September 17, 2023, Curcio brought a binder full of cards to a card and memorabilia expo at the Palm Springs Convention Center.

“If they were real, you would be a moron not to buy all of them,” said Ewald. The binder, if genuine, was worth between $3 and $5 million.

At one of the booths, he met Jeffrey Johnson, who ran a popular ticket resale and sports card operation called Captain Ticket. Johnson pulled out a 10x jeweler’s loupe and examined Curcio’s cards, including an ’84 Jordan rookie card graded by PSA as 10, Gem Mint, and a 1960 Mickey Mantle graded PSA 6.5. The two traded on the spot — Johnson paid Curcio $6,800 for the pair.

After Curcio left the booth, another collector approached Johnson to warn him that Curcio was a counterfeiter. Johnson immediately reported the tip to the FBI, which soon registered him as an informant. Days later, Johnson texted Curcio, pressing him to send more cards on consignment. “No super rush,” he texted, “but ‘whales’ don’t grow on trees.” Curcio mailed Johnson the cards, including a 1968 Topps Nolan Ryan PSA 9 and a 1981 Topps Joe Montana PSA 10, together worth well over $100,000 if authentic. Curcio and Johnson agreed that Johnson would sell them on consignment and return anything unsold.

Instead, Johnson sent Curcio’s cards to PSA. When Curcio demanded them back, Johnson texted him: “The Nolan Ryan card is with PSA and law enforcement, Anthony. It’s counterfeit. Why do you want a counterfeit card? That’s a felony.” Johnson then posted in a 30,000-member Facebook collector group, accusing Curcio of peddling fakes at shows across the country. Curcio sued him for defamation and conversion of property. This time, he was vindicated. On March 11, 2024, a Washington State court entered a default judgment of $123,267 in Curcio’s favor. Curcio says he has not been paid by Johnson yet.

With his reputation tarnished among collectors, Curcio started attending shows under pseudonyms. At the Chicago Sports Spectacular in the Rosemont Convention Center in November 2023, a man who introduced himself as Brendan Wooley visited the booth of veteran dealer Remington Ewald. Wooley handed Ewald his business card, and then opened a binder to reveal what looked to Ewald like a gold mine: It was full of 1986 Fleer PSA 10s — Jordans, Montanas, Marinos — and a Jim Brown, well-centered, in a PSA 8, a card that comes up centered maybe 10% of the time. Wooley told Ewald he was going through a divorce and needed to liquidate fast.

Ewald arched his brow. The cards, if real, were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each. The man was offering them at a roughly 90% discount. “Michael Jordan is more popular than Jesus in Chicago,” Ewald told the jury at trial, “and most people don’t go around Chicago selling Michael Jordan rookie cards for 10% of value.” As Ewald was examining the cards, he took a photo of the slab. PSA holders are designed with a holographic-style symbol that should remain consistent under any light — but in Ewald’s photo, the PSA logo shifted colors. “That never happens,” he testified. It was the tell. The card inside might have been real. The case around it wasn’t. Suddenly, Brendan Wooley said he had a flight to catch, and left.

Five months later, at an expo in Edison, New Jersey, Ewald spotted Wooley again, sitting down across from him with the same binder of cards. “He didn’t notice I was the same person from Chicago,” Ewald tells me. Once again, the prices were so low, Ewald testified, that “if they were real, you would be a moron not to buy all of them.” The binder, if genuine, was worth between $3 and $5 million. Ewald then brought in multiple experts to examine the binder — a veteran dealer of four decades who thought the slabs looked real, and a former PSA employee who wasn’t entirely sure. Most glaringly, Ewald said, Wooley was selling more copies of a single card — a Knicks card from 1986 — than existed. “There were more PSA 10s in that folder than there were on earth,” Ewald said. He found an officer working a security shift at the show and told him he suspected a counterfeiter. The officer asked for the man’s driver’s license, which bore his real name: Anthony Curcio.

By 2024, his marriage with Emily was falling apart. That February, she filed for divorce. When I reached Emily by phone, she declined to be interviewed for this story. But when I spoke with her for GQ in 2009, she had told me that Curcio is “the life of the party, until he’s the death of the party.”

Three months later, on the early morning of May 23, 2024, Curcio was walking through his neighborhood in Redmond. It was quiet — what he called “raccoon hours.” Then he heard cars coming up behind him. FBI agents stormed him, guns drawn; he counted around 20. “What the fuck is this about?” he said. “You’re here for sports cards?” He told them about the judgment he’d just won against Captain Ticket. They said they knew all about it.

His daughters weren’t yet awake. As he sat in a car in custody, he pleaded with the agents to wait until the girls left for school. In exchange, he would give them the combinations to every wall safe in the house. They agreed. Moments after Emily and the girls pulled out of the driveway in their white Toyota, the agents swarmed in.

As he sat in a car in custody, he pleaded with the agents to wait until the girls left for school.

They recovered what they described as tools for counterfeiting: loose PSA labels, some already erased or partially erased and ready to be reprinted; label printing templates; razor blades, knives, scissors, Q-tips, inks, and a small electric grinding pen. They also found videos the government would present as evidence of him manipulating cards, and a spreadsheet that the government said tracked which cards Curcio had given fake grades and how he had sold them.

Curcio had a different explanation. The videos and tools were research materials, he maintained — proof-of-concept demonstrations intended for the documentary. He said he had been recording himself showing how PSA’s security features could be defeated, not to defraud buyers, but to expose PSA’s vulnerabilities. “They took screenshots from the videos,” he told me. “If they had played the entire clip, you would hear me speaking to the camera, explaining exactly what I was doing and why.”

By the time Curcio arrived in New York for the start of his trial in January 2026, he was hoping that mounting controversies around PSA might weigh in his favor. The previous month, collectors had begun documenting cases they said showed PSA purchasing cards back from submitters, upgrading the grades internally, and reselling them at PSA 10 prices. Critics said the company had become both the referee and a player on the field — grading its own inventory by its own standards and profiting from the results. “Our graders evaluate items based on their merit, not their owner or destination,” PSA’s spokesperson said, “and we maintain strict operational firewalls between third-party partner offer programs and internal quality auditing workflows.”

That same month, Rep. Pat Ryan of New York wrote a letter demanding that the Federal Trade Commission open an antitrust investigation into Collectors. Beyond the company’s 80% share of the card-grading market, Ryan also flagged what he called a conflict of interest with Collectors’ acquisition of CardLadder, an industry price-tracking service, and described barriers to entry that effectively shut out any competitors. He called the company “Collectivus Holdings” in reference to what he characterized as its strategy of regulatory evasion.

It made no difference in Curcio’s case. Before the trial began, the judge had drawn a clear line: PSA’s own conduct was not on trial.

Curcio says he wanted to testify, but his attorneys warned that the government would use his prior conviction and criminal history to destroy his credibility before the jury. The prosecution opened with its paper trail: eBay sales records, shipping logs, buyer complaints, and PSA database comparisons showing that certification numbers on cards Curcio sold corresponded to cards that looked nothing like the ones originally graded.

Then came the government’s first central witness, Joe Bondarchuk. The youth basketball coach had pleaded guilty before trial and agreed to cooperate. He testified that he watched Curcio crack open authentic PSA holders, swap cards, modify labels, and reseal the cases more than 20 times.

PSA’s Jackie Curiel walked jurors through the physical details she said gave Curcio’s Jordan away: a rounded bottom-left corner on the plastic case where a legitimate PSA holder would have a sharp 90-degree angle, and a version of the PSA logo that, according to internal records, didn’t exist at the time the card was supposedly graded. The defense’s key witness, filmmaker Jeremiah Murphy, said that Curcio wanted to expose what he believed was PSA’s corruption. “He said he had evidence,” Murphy told me, “but it was never sent to me.”

“He claimed other people in the card industry were out to get him, as if he were a victim,” Assistant US Attorney Cecilia Vogel said in closing arguments. “None of this stopped him. Instead, he doubled down on the fraud.”

On January 28, following four hours of deliberation, the jury returned with the verdict: guilty on all counts.

Afterward, PSA released a statement. “Over the past two years, the PSA Brand Protection team worked diligently with the FBI as it built its case to charge Anthony Curcio,” it read. “PSA is focused on making sure its holders, labels, processes, and technology are continuously evolving to stay ahead of the bad actors in the hobby.”

Six weeks later in March, Curcio filed a 61-page civil suit against Collectors in King County Superior Court, with allegations that he was not allowed to present at trial: that PSA deactivated his Jordan card without physically examining it; that PSA personnel cracked open his card holders and transmitted the components to the FBI without a warrant or subpoena; that PSA’s communications to law enforcement were not good-faith reporting but selective, self-serving disclosure designed to advance the company’s commercial interests. The case was removed to federal district court, where it is pending. In a statement, a PSA spokesperson wrote, “We won’t comment on the specifics of the pending litigation, other than to state that Anthony Curcio’s claims against PSA are without merit. We look forward to affirming our brand and reputation through the legal process.”

But Curcio wasn’t done yet. In May, he wrote to the judge alleging that his trial counsel, Simpson Thacher, had a hidden conflict of interest with Steve Cohen — the billionaire who helped bankroll Collectors Holdings — through their undisclosed work with Cohen’s hedge fund, Point72. Simpson Thacher told the court that their work with Point72 is “wholly unrelated” to the trial. The court denied his motion for a new trial.

Curcio isn’t the only one with grievances against PSA. In April, collectors launched a boycott, #NoPSAMay, alleging that PSA upgraded grades on cards it had bought back cheaply from a collector, and resold at a markup. They also claimed that bulk turnaround times had stretched to nearly eight months, and that fees had been hiked twice in a year. Boycotters pledged to route submissions to rival grading companies. None of it slowed the company down. PSA president Ryan Hoge said, “We’re not seeing any signs of slowdown on the horizon.” The company graded 19 million cards in 2025, up from 2 million in 2020. In May, Collectors announced a $200 million investment, and 1,000 new jobs.

As he awaits his sentencing in October, Curcio has been living in an RV. He says he’s been drinking again for the first time in over a decade. He’s terrified of spending decades in prison away from his kids. But he insists that he’s right about PSA, that the truth is out there, and that he can still win in the end. “I want to fight,” he told me. “It’s not over.”

David Kushner is a regular contributor to Business Insider. His new book, “Ocean of Bones: The Hunt for the Pirate Slave Ship Guerrero,” will be published in November.