HOBO NICKEL CAST COPIES FLOOD MARKET

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V24 2021 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 24, Number 2, January 10, 2021, Article 21

With permission, we're publishing this excerpt from Carol Bastable's President's Message in the Winter 2020 issue of Bo Tales, the official publication of the Original Hobo Nickel Society, Inc. Thanks. -Editor

I would like to bring up the ongoing problem of hobo nickel cast coins that have been appearing on eBay. These are a problem from several perspectives. First, these are original designs stolen from the carvers that originally made them and can mean a loss of revenue for the carvers. Some people (maybe not members of our club) buy the castings because they cost pennies on the dollar compared to the original labor intensive carvings. Copies may even go as far as diluting the value of the original art. We have discussed the issue on our OHNS Facebook page ever since the first ones started showing up. China, who does not have copyright laws, has been the culprit in creating the copies. If you are an artist that has been copied, you can file a Vero report with eBay to try to have a listing pulled. It is a constant ongoing battle as one seller may get shut down; another one can pop up at any time.

While these copies are a plague for the original artists, it can also affect buyers when sellers do not disclose that they are copies. This happened in the beginning when the copies first hit the market. The copies were identified and posted on OHNS Facebook in order to immediately get the word out. As a result, multiple complaints went into eBay from our Facebook members and sellers were shutdown. We stayed vigilant about that and sellers soon realized that they would have to list these as copies, casings, tokens, fantasy issues, or the like. That worked well to keep buyers from getting scammed.

Unfortunately there was a recent instance of a seller from the U.S. that had some of these copies mixed in with other listings of real hobo nickels. This might have been a collection bought second hand and the seller was not expert enough on the subject to know what they owned. While many collectors of hobo nickels have become familiar with the look of the Chinese copies, some of these copies in this sellers group looked very real. And on top of that when the original artist notified the seller that they were counterfeit copies, the seller did not cancel the listings and eBay acted too slowly to pull the listings with copies then selling in the $175 range. Your safest bet is to buy directly from the artist or a seller you know well (preferably an OHNS member). OHNS can help arbitrate in a financial dealing gone wrong if both parties are club members. Remember the code of ethics that OHNS has members agree to and must abide by.

One other issue with these copies, even when listed correctly, is that they clog the search engine when one wants to find "real" hobo nickels and not wade through a bunch of junk!

Bibliophiles run across the same problem with reprints of out-of-copyright numismatic literature. Your heart skips a beat when you come across a listing of that rare work you've been seeking for years, only to discover that it's just a made-to-order printout of a publicly-available digital copy. They're perfectly legal when properly described, but a nuisance to those searching for the Real McCoy.

OHNS is experimenting with a way for legitimate sellers of genuine products to distinguish their listings, but as noted it's an endless game of Whack-A-Mole with unscrupulous sellers, who always find a way to reappear. -Editor