fleaBay is endless entertainment for me. Last night there was a seller that had 5 consecutive listings of fake coins. You've got to be an idiot to buy supposedly rare silver coins for half of melt.
Or lucky. I nabbed a few on eBay over the course of several years. Turned a nice profit on a few of them, but if you factor it out over the time and attention I spent, it's another sub-minimum wage job. But, yeah, when you see a key date raw coin and the listing says "5 available"... nope.
Yep. Every once in a while you find a unicorn, but it's on auction, not "buy it now". I'm still pinching myself for grabbing a raw Morgan that ended up grading PCGS MS67 for about $60 bucks. But that was last year. Glory days! And those times are why I keep looking.
For me, it was usually the other way around - find something that was freshly posted BIN at a lower-than-expected price, and snatch it before anyone else could. I got pretty good at spotting the legit ones, and Buyer Protection had me covered in the cases where I didn't receive what was advertised. But, again, too much time and attention, and the last few times I tried it seemed like the pickings were too sparse to make it worthwhile. (Too many bad listings, too few good ones.)
Heh. That made me go and take a look at new BIN listings, where I spotted this: Listed at 7:01PDT, sold at 7:04PDT. I saw it at 7:08PDT. (It takes a while for listings to disappear from the not-yet-sold lists.) At a bit under half melt, heck yes I would've been a buyer. And it smells legit to me, although of course I wouldn't know until I received it (or not).
Or a just-listed lot of 15 silver dollars for $820, a bit under spot. Mostly worn, and mostly Peace, and only obverses shown, but there are at least two 1934 Peace dollars showing, and one looks to be in fairly nice shape. I took a chance on a similar lot years ago where I could see that one of the 1934 coins looked like an S. It was, it graded AU50, and it covered more than half the cost of the lot. Dammit. I can not afford the time to get sucked back into this tonight.
