Canadian Accounts Unlocked

Update October 15th, 2025

We're updating this post to reflect the current status of Canadian accounts on Cardsphere. We're happy to let our users in Canada know that the account locks have been removed in response to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers announcement last week that they would switch to rotating strikes.

Users in Canada should note the following:

1. We will be adding an additional 10 days of transit time to any currently in-transit packages to or from Canada. Regular transit times will apply to packages committed/shipped after October 15, 2025.

2. We are unlocking Canadian accounts but not removing their vacation status. This is to allow those users time to update any Wants/Offers that have been made stale by the temporary lock.

Thank you and welcome back!

(original post below)

Hello traders,

Today we're making the unfortunate announcement that we have vacation locked our users in Canada in response to the sudden announcement of a mail strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.  We will also soon be temporarily removing the country of Canada from package matching, which, combined with vacation lock, will temporarily prevent Canadian users from sending or receiving packages.

In the past, we placed our Canadian users in vacation mode temporarily but allowed them to continue trading with the understanding that they would assume risk and would have to wait for the strike to end before they could report anything as lost. In the end, we ended up with only 2 or 3 packages that never showed up. And while that looks good on paper, it caused a lot of frustration among those that were trading with our Canadian users by forcing them to wait for the full international transit time of 4-5 weeks before trades were settled.

This time around, we'll be vacation locking users in Canada until the strike has ended. If you currently have a trade in progress with users in Canada, here’s how it will be handled:

Senders with packages en route to Canada (International)
We'll allow the full transit time of 5 weeks from date the packages were marked shipped to allow the trade to complete as normal should the strike come to an end soon. Once the 5-week mark has been reached, we'll credit the senders and note this on both accounts.

Receivers with packages en route from Canada (International)
We'll allow the full transit time of 5 weeks from the date the packages were marked shipped to allow the trade to complete as normal should the strike come to an end soon. Once the 5-week mark has been reached, we'll refund the receiver and note this on both accounts.

Canadian Domestic Trades
These trades will remain as in transit until the strike ends.

When the Strike Ends
We learned last time that, eventually, most of these packages will arrive once the strike ends. When that happens, we'll unlock the Canadian accounts and then ask both senders and receivers to allow for several weeks for Canada Post to work through the back log and then reach out to us should those packages never arrive.

We'll also ask users that were receiving cards from a sender to reach out to us when those eventually arrive, so that we may credit the senders, or help facilitate a return.

Additional Notes
Because we are a worldwide trading site, we'll be notifying all users of these changes regardless of location via email. Please note that, although these are overarching changes to our transit times, disputes are still handled by a case by case basis and site admins will still perform an account review prior to settling any dispute.

efren