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.
Here's another one a 1909 s vdb ms63 for 115. Common these days https://www.ebay.com/itm/358533141846?_skw=1909+s+vdb+lincoln+cent&itmmeta=01KR3QRA0MWFE9SBX5WZNTP1Y7&hash=item537a3d9556:g:wWMAAeSwATdp~c78&itmprp=enc:AQALAAAA8GfYFPkwiKCW4ZNSs2u11xCJAK1wc2ej0X9CQhRWwWww0+CSzles7yS/UMGF3bcHQUZ3iQoMvBvBdJRFYi8D79JK+tOlMUSOQspZcPxG5vW/sVmwWZfAtjCU6DL/cms0w0RITD0pSoyP07JN3x2SAUZXGvxjQt65u093iDUicg3o5GYIdhpoV23Xc31EIDq77BsGNym2d8Lx28OTvyfJMOpeMz7DiXbtUC3Ob5STEZaE2eqH69Mieb8Y7z7m/OlihYRzpgNWoItcY87sFL1oyPkhwmYwv/GjpPW+TqLOtRx39uc6U0bI38O3n68RLO56QQ==|tkp:Bk9SR8Kg4ffAZw
Well that picture looks real but I doubt that's what you'd actually get. Let's see, red flags: No typed description of the coin Name that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard No feedback Selling a rare coin way under what it should sell for in that condition (or ANY condition for that matter! It would be about $1500 in VF-35!) Yeah don't think I'll bid on that one lol. Probably just copied the picture from someone else's listing.
Good catch; I honestly missed that. The seller corrected their listing (which previously also had the wrong grade on it; they said it was MS65 rather than MS63). I guess that price is within reason for a 1909 VDB in that condition, if that's what you'd actually get. I don't know though, still seems like a gamble for someone with no feedback and not selling anything else but this coin. But I have to concede it might be legitimate. Coveat emptor.
There are many other 09 VDB's that can be had for that price. I wouldn't gamble with someone who can't Identify clearly what he is trying to sell, maybe an in hand buy.
I only "gamble" when there's nothing much at stake; where there's not much reason to bother faking it or it's easy enough to make a profit selling the real thing. (I only ever ended up with a fake on eBay once and strangely it wasn't even a coin that would have been worth much if it was real, about $15. Maybe the seller didn't know it was fake either.) This... is not something I would gamble on, because it's not hard to find someone selling this in person. Besides at this point, when my Lincoln cent collection is almost complete, filling in the last empty holes is a higher priority than upgrading already filled holes (unless I can do so for almost free), so I wouldn't be in the market for this anyway.
