When you hold a Pokémon card that you paid a lot of money for and wonder if it’s real, it’s a little unsettling. Not because the card seems sketchy. Since it doesn’t. That is the exact issue.
Professional Sports Authenticators (PSA), the company that grades trading cards for collectors all over the world, said in a 2025 report that Pokémon TCG cards have become the most popular target for trading card fraud in the world. It’s not just the largest. Through a large margin. Ryan Hoge, president of PSA, said it best: Pokémon “dwarfs everything else.” In 2025, 56.3% of all the fake trading cards that the group dealt with were Pokémon cards. That number is 250% higher than it was the year before.
To get an idea of the scale, look at the ten subjects of the most fake trading cards in 2025. Six of those spots are taken by Pokémon. Charizard is in first place. John Wall is in second place. Pikachu is in third place, just ahead of Mickey Mantle. So Gengar came in first, before Tom Brady. After that came Rayquaza, Umbreon, and Mewtwo. Ken Griffey Jr. gets the last spot. Even five years ago, this list would have seemed crazy, but here we are.
Once you think about it, it’s easy to see what’s behind this. Some graded Pokémon cards have sold at auction for thousands of dollars, showing how valuable they have become as collectibles. People are ready to lie about having that much money. For example, the number of fake 2014 Pokémon Phantom Forces M Gengar EX cards rose by 656% in just one year. It’s not a trend. That’s a surge.
But the problem with fakes isn’t the only one. Along with it, there’s a more subtle and possibly sneakier problem: cards that have been changed. Most of the time, fakes aren’t like these. They are real cards that have been carefully changed to make them look better than they are. For example, the corners have been touched up, the edges have been recolored, and the surfaces have been polished. The goal is to get a better grade from groups like PSA, which can make a card worth a lot more on the market. In 2025, the number of changed cards sent in rose by 108.7%, and 69.8% of that fraud was Pokémon cards. Nine of the ten cards that were changed the most were Pokémon. There were ten cards that had been changed the most, and all of them were Pokémon cards.
After reading PSA’s report, it seems like this hobby has moved into really weird territory. The changes that are being made are so complex that only a very skilled person can find them. For obvious reasons, PSA usually doesn’t share its detection methods with the public. Letting fakers know about them helps them adapt. This year, there was so much fraud that PSA did something unusual: it shared some of what it knows with the public. They did this because they thought that protecting collectors was more important than giving bad guys information.
In the report, Matt Hendler, Head of Grading Brand Protection at PSA, said that thieves are already changing how they act by choosing cheaper cards that are less likely to be checked. It makes sense to make the change. It might be easier for a $10 card that looks real to get through than a well-known Charizard that every grader is looking for.
This is really hard for collectors to deal with, especially those who are new to the hobby. People who are excited about Pokémon cards but maybe not yet experienced enough to spot the warning signs have been drawn in by the fast growth of the market. If the card in the slab looks like it’s real, buying in good faith won’t protect you. It’s still not clear how much of the secondary market has already been quietly tainted by fake or changed cards that got through some point of inspection.
PSA’s promise that every card, no matter how valuable, will be carefully checked is worth something. The fact that the other side of the problem is getting better at what they do is also true. People who collect Pokémon cards today should be careful about what they trust, check things out when you can, and go in with their eyes open.
