Between June and August 2026 we adjudicated roughly 1,350 random eBay Pokemon listings by hand: read the title, then read the actual photographs, and record which one was right about the card being sold. The rule we ended up carving into our process applies to every buyer: the pixels outrank the title. Always.
The lies are not malicious, mostly
The typical wrong title is not a scam. It is a seller filing a card under the set they remember, the number on the wrong corner, or the name a price app suggested. A Japanese Forretress titled Clay Burst 005/071 was actually Shiny Treasure ex 009/190, a different set with a different market. A trainer card titled with one set sold from another. A listing titled SV69 for the promo birds was the main set 69/68 print. Each of those trades at a different price, and every one of them poisons a naive median.
A buyer's checklist
One: read the collector number and set total off the photo, bottom of the card, and confirm they match the title. Two: on vintage, look for the 1st Edition stamp in the photo rather than trusting the word Edition in the title, and treat an unmarked card as Unlimited. Three: on graded cards, read the label in the photo, company, grade, and cert, because titles routinely round a 9.5 up to a 10. Four: if the photo is too blurry to verify any of this, price it as the cheapest thing the listing could be, or walk.
Corpus: random raw and slab listings sampled for scanner certification suites 270 through 325, adjudicated manually against listing photographs. The examples named were real listings observed during adjudication.