"You failed to mention an American sale that was canceled just a few years ago, involving a consignment of early U.S. proof sets. The owner of the coins was a lady from Butler, PA, who had been judged incompetent for a number of years and had a caretaker. This caretaker talked the old lady into going with her to the safe deposit of a local bank where the coins were withdrawn. The caretaker then sold them to a local Butler coin dealer for $60,000. The dealer in turn consigned the coins for sale at auction.

The lady's son-in-law saw some of the remaining coins in the house and started checking on the values. When he found out that they were worth significantly more than what the lady was paid, he raised a stink and got an injunction to stop the sale. The coins were eventually sold by Superior for $1.5 million."

"Saul also told me that a large number of early proof sets started turning up on the East coast at that time and he suspects that more of the sets were sold under the table, so to speak. There was never any inventory so nothing could be proved but the son-in-law remembers seeing 1936 proof sets years earlier that never turned up anywhere."