NSA Reads Sports Card Info

The other day I was told by one of my readers to check out NSA’s (National Sportscard Authenticator) new website.  Their old one had been under construction for a very long time.  After checking out their Testimonials page I noticed something that seemed very familiar.  Almost like I’ve seen these sentences before.  Wait a minute!  I think I have.  NSA copied & pasted comments made on my initial post I wrote about them.  It wouldn’t surprise me if they wrote those comments and then put them on their site.  I also like how on their Product page they state “NSA has nothing to hide.”  I’m betting when a company says they have nothing to hide, 95% of the time they probably do.

NSA asks people to contact them if they have a piece of “game-used” memorabilia they would like to sell.  Just for the fun of it, I made up a story to see what they would say and I received the following response:

Thank you for your inquiry. Yes! We are very interested in purchasing your jersey. There are a few strict qualifications that your piece must meet. First and foremost, do you have any COA? Second, do you have a photo of your meeting and Jeter handing you this jersey? If so, we may accept your piece and at that point what we normally do is visit your local area courthouse with you, all expenses on us, and obtain a sworn affidavit verifying the authenticity of the piece.

We also send it off to a qualified authentication company. To clarify, we do not offer in house authentication, and we only accept pieces after they have been authenticated by a qualified company. Therefore once the piece is ready to be made our company can certify each piece since NSA is a relatively new company. This insures our integrity and a quality product for our customers.

We look forward to your response,

NSA Grading Merchandising Team

Even though it sounds like they want to try and make sure the relics are real, there is just something about them I don’t like.  I would really like to know who their “authenticator” is since they say they don’t do it in house.  I e-mailed NSA back asking who they use, but I haven’t received a response back yet.  I asked them this a long time ago too and never received a response.  If I do get one, I’ll be sure to let you know.  None of the COA’s on their cards state who the authenticator is.  Not even their newer cards.  As I have stated in numerous other posts, I still don’t trust this company.  Its not possible to pickup an authentic NBA logo patch card of Michael Jordan for $20.00.  Manufactured patch cards in some cases sell for much more than that.  Remember people, if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.

UPDATE:

I did get a response from NSA and they wouldn’t give me the names of their (3) authenticators they use.  Probably because they don’t use any!!  Be sure to check out this post over on SCU about this fake crap.

National Sportscard Authenticators (NSA)

National Sportscard Authenticators (NSA) is a card manufacturer and grading company.  They sell game used cards slabbed in their protective holders of players from all different sports.  On their website they claim that if they grade a card that has been trimmed or is counterfeit they will pay the cardholder $1,500.00.  I wonder how that really works?  If someone sends in a card for grading that they know it is counterfeit or trimmed and it comes back graded what is the person going to do?  Are they going to admit the card was doctored?  Probably not.  Even if you sent the card in and didn’t know it was doctored and it comes back graded, how does that help?  If you sent in a card in which NSA graded it you would have to remove it from the holder and submit it to another grading company like PSA or BGS just to get a second opinion.  The whole thing seems a bit confusing to me.  The serial numbering on the cards for example says “1 of 25”.  Why couldn’t they just stick with “1/25” for a serial number?  The way they have the cards numbered makes you think they are part of a set and not serial numbered.  Browsing eBay you can see that NSA cards don’t really sell that well.  Most of them don’t even sell at all.  Personally, I wouldn’t buy them, but thats just me.  Has anyone else had any experience with them?