Sometime in the past few years, sports trading cards quietly turned into real money-making tools. A piece of cardboard with two signatures, a patch of jersey fabric, and a hole in it can now sell for millions of dollars without getting much attention. That’s the world we live in. It’s important to pay close attention to a lawsuit that says the auction system that runs a lot of that market was hacked from the inside.
Market for sports cards Alt sent a lawsuit to the New York Supreme Court this week against PWCC, the company that used to own an auction house but now belongs to Fanatics. The lawsuit claims fraud, shill bidding, and breach of auctioneer’s duty. Not small amounts of money are at stake. Alt says it bought 809 items and won 707 auctions worth more than $10.7 million on PWCC’s platform between 2021 and 2023. It is now asking for at least $13.7 million in damages and extra money to punish the person.
The main claim is that PWCC ran what Alt calls a widespread, years-long scheme of fake bidding, in which both inside and outside actors inflated the prices of valuable cards for no reason. Alt says that PWCC kept secret information about the highest bids, which means that the house may have known exactly how high serious buyers were willing to go and used that information to drive prices right up to the ceiling. That’s not a quirk if it’s true. In an auction, that’s the same thing as someone looking at your poker hand.
Alt says it didn’t find out about this until late 2023, when it was revealed that PWCC’s leaders not only knew about the shill bidding but also encouraged it. According to the complaint, PWCC also flagged participants with a lot of money, like Alt, and then set up fake bids around those buyers to get more money from them. “This lawsuit is about more than just one company,” Leore Avidar, CEO of Alt, said, “it’s about ensuring the integrity of the trading card market as a whole.”
PWCC, on the other hand, says nothing is true. A spokesperson said that the lawsuit was “completely baseless” and that Alt had not provided any evidence to support its claims, even after months of back-and-forth talks. The company also said that the alleged behavior happened before Fanatics bought PWCC in May 2023, which is a point they seem eager to make. That’s okay from a legal point of view. But it doesn’t really clear things up.
It’s important to note that PWCC has been accused of these things before. eBay kicked the company off its site in August 2021 after finding out that PWCC had been shill bidding. eBay made a quiet but clear public statement at the time, saying something like “buyers should be able to trade with confidence.” In response, PWCC set up its own auction site. After two years, Fanatics bought PWCC and changed the name to Fanatics Collect.
There are mind-boggling numbers coming out of the high-end card market at the same time as all of this. Yesterday, a signed, numbered 1-of-1 dual MVP gold Logoman card with game-worn patches from Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani sold through Fanatics Collect for $2.16 million. This made it the fourth-most expensive modern baseball card ever to be sold at auction. As you watch these prices go up, you get the sense that the market has really gotten behind the idea of real provenance. For collectors, it’s important to know which game, at-bat, and swing a patch is from. That level of detail is what makes it valuable.
That’s exactly why the Alt lawsuit is so important. If buyers couldn’t believe that the prices they paid were based on real demand from real bidders, then the idea of fair market value itself would start to feel unstable. It’s still not clear how this will go in court, and the fact that PWCC has a new owner makes questions about liability more complicated. But people who collect things are looking at it, and they should be.
