The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 34, August 5, 2005, Article 18

COUNTERFEITS ON EBAY

Ralf Böpple writes: "I agree that there are a lot of fakes on eBay.
However, this has not been a bad thing as such for me personally,
because I have been able to acquire a number of contemporary
counterfeits of coins in my collection, as well as a number of
modern fabrications which I can use for study purposes.

In the past, I have been unable to get these counterfeits,
because dealers do not want to sell them - quite understandably,
of course, because even if the dealer and me agree on the
fact that the coin is a fake, he would not want to run the risk
that in some distant future a fake coin appears on the market
with the pedigree "bought from Dealer XY:::" Most of these
fake items sell at the moderate prices at which they should
sell, and they were either correctly offered as counterfeits or
with a statement along the lines of "I am no collector and
don't know much of these things and can't guarantee anything",
which is always a sign that the seller knows pretty well the
item at sale is not the real McCoy.

In two cases of less obvious counterfeits, I have contacted
the sellers (on eBay Germany), and both of them took the
coins off, in one case the sale had already expired and the
seller put me in contact with the buyer and offered to cancel
the transaction at his own cost.

On the other hand, I have contacted sellers on German eBay
of these little Mexican "Maximiliano Emperador" gold disks
and informed them that these are neither "RRR" nor issued
by the Mexican authorities nor really "desirable collectibles".
Most did not react at all, one changed his description of the
item by adding a small "NP" for "Nachprägung" (copy), which
can easily be overlooked. One frequent seller made hilarious
statements about the origin and the value of these disks, and
he did not reply to several emails from me, so that I finally
sent an email to every winning bidder, making no claims
about these items at all but only providing a link to a homepage
that gives more information about them. It must have worked,
because now the same seller offers all his items as 'private
auctions', making this after-sale contact impossible! "

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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