PCGS vs Coin Doctors Lawsuit

Why not? It's directly from all the horse's mouths. It won't have everything, certainly - there is most likely 10x that in files somewhere, protected by lawyer-client privilege. But that information is right there and could possibly tell a researcher quite a bit. Yet you prefer to come here and cast aspersions on everyone's character rather than get factual information. Why?

My duck is huge. Usually loud, too. It yells about "education" and "teaching the young'uns" and something about teaching a man to fish. Friggin' thing won't shut up.

You're welcome. [I know you said that facetiously; I did not] It was only to highlight the ease in finding information if you dig in the right spot. The better thing would be to go down to the courthouse where it happened and see if you can look at the microfiche (some things may not be online, even though they may say 100% is). Some parts may only be viewable by the parties concerned, but redactions in any hard copies you can get will point to their existence. Digging sometimes takes a while.

Asking on forums is good, too, like you did. Plenty of people around like SSDD and V Kurt who have more knowledge in their pinky toe than I'll have in a lifetime - but don't make the mistake of judging before you get all the facts you possibly can.

Agreed. Cross check and quadruple check, against all the sources you can find. Records can be blacked out or lost, memories can be faulty, and so can egos.

Yes, it should have. There seems to have been a lot going on out of the public eye, and it sounds like agreements were reached behind closed doors. As Ms. Sperber talked about maybe that being the best way, she may have been trying to hint that was how it happened.

Was there something numismatically important going on at the time? Perhaps that overshadowed these events? Maybe purposely?

Lawsuits can be filed for any number of reasons. If PCGS seriously thought someone was continuing to send them doctored coins, they would have booted them from the authorized dealer program - otherwise they would be a detriment to their business. If we carry that thought forward, then either they didn't believe the charges they filed against them and it was only a shot across the bow for some other reason, or the doctors signed a binding contract that if they did it again they'd be in for million$ worth of fines. And maybe keeping their authorized dealer status was part of the deal. This is all conjecture, because the only way we'll ever know is if someone who was actually there lets the cat out of the bag.

OUCH. NOW LISTEN HERE
..13 years? Are you a glutton for punishment?

But no, I was absolutely not stating that any online search is a replacement for getting your butt physically to the court house/library and requesting the actual records. My only aim was to point out the amount of info he'd missed out on when he was complaining there was none out there. I think I covered some of that above. Research you gain can lead to more, as long as what you have is credible, and one should exhaust all avenues if one is seriously researching.

One of my biggest regrets is that I never made it to the Smithsonian to talk to Dr. Doty while he was alive. I was very close to DC and should have done it while I could. There is nothing better than talking to history-makers or seeing actual records for yourself.. and besides the fact that speaking with him would have been immensely educational, he was also a very nice man.

About the dealer v. PCGS thing.. the last third of this article by Steve Kaden (Catman) over at CCF is especially relevant. If you don't want to read all that, do a page search for the paragraph that starts "The move of the investor into the hobby began to create problems with grading." The rest covers the time frame of the spike in the graph.

I'm so sorry. Losing someone we care about is hard.. losing one to something like this would make it exponentially worse.

Also, sorry about the lateness of my reply. I lurk here a lot but I suck at timely responses, so usually don't say anything because of it.

 

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And if my post wasn't already long and boring enough, I also meant to add:

The BBB is a fraud. ['ware automatically starting videos]

 

Auto-starting videos don't exist for me anymore. I use Safari on a Macintosh running Mac OS 10.13.1. It blocks them.

By the way, take it from someone who spent over 25 years in a family business - the Better Business Bureau is and always has been a "pay for play" scam. It's a protection racket, and not a good one, at that.

 

If there was no collusion between PCGS and Coin Doctors...

I'm trying to understand what types of alterations PCGS has been fuming over, since many of the obvious alterations can be labeled as "Details" and the dealers will lose out without a tangible loss on PCGS's part, since they're not straight grading coins that should be slabbed as Details. Is there an example of a doctored, or suspected to be, coin in a PCGS slab? Or, is that the issue - that we really can't tell lol.

I want to see what it looks like, however PCGS may have labeled it (Details or straight grade). Is this coin below posted earlier by @Beefer518 on the "Details Discount" thread one similar example (which didn't pass; not that the specific coin below is an expert coin doctor's alteration)?

Or, is coin doctoring limited to only certain types of alterations? For instance, IMHO, AT/NT is coin doctoring but that seems to be relatively more intermediate or even elementary compared to an expert level alteration. Otherwise, obviously altered coins would give any TPG a bad reputation.

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If there was a collusion between PCGS and coin doctors...

This whole thing seems odd to me. If PCGS was actually in a conspiracy with dealers to straight slab expertly altered coins, then why pursue a lawsuit? Wouldn't it be less costly to PCGS to simply give future coins a Details grade and dealers would adjust their behavior? Then, all of a sudden, coin doctor-dealers may feel betrayed in their previously tacit collusion, but the message would be made clear without making a huge fuss about it.

 

There is a VERY HUGE LEGAL difference between "collusion" and settling a series of lawsuits with mutual non-disclosure agreements, which MUST be approved by a judge once they are in court. However, there is an itty bitty tiny practical difference between those two things in the vernacular of the common everyday dude.

This exhibits why lawyers think differently and speak differently. Their world IS different. You have to back off from trying to think about these matters as any guy on the street would. It'll only screw up your head.

 

Well if you are talking about the pre-2010 era: They straight graded doctored coins because they couldn't catch the alterations. Or they let them through knowingly. Either way it's bad. When you have a bad story you need to make up a good story so people won't think about the bad story. A lawsuit. Sniffer technology. You've now turned your incompetence or collusion into praise and a reputation of standing up for the common collector rather than that of being unable to do what you were paid to do.

And as for dei: I'll get back to you after I read your diatribe...on my way to the courthouse first. Got some microfiche I have to search for in a courthouse basement. This damn internet is for losers. No one looks for answers here.

 

There was no nothing, Kurt--no settlement, no agreements, no nothing--just a huge publicity stunt. Do you have any concept of the mileage they got out of it, the three plus three months in federal court, dismissed-out for failure to serve anybody? Those six months are like a freebie in federal court, so long as the frivolous complaint isn't served. Fear. The fear of coin-doctors around every corner. That's what their stooges and marketers were selling, and they did a great job of it.

 

Amen

 

Now wait, I saw a dismissal with prejudice on the docket sheet for the counterclaim shown upthread.

"...
35 REQUEST FOR DISMISSAL WITH PREJUDICE - ENTIRE ACTION FILED BY DIGENOVA, SILVANO; KRILL, GREG; WESSELINK, RICHARD ON 11/07/2011 11/07/2011 2 pages
36 COMPLAINT DISPOSED WITH DISPOSITION OF REQUEST FOR DISMISSAL. 11/07/2011 NV
37 CASE DISMISSED WITH DISPOSITION OF REQUEST FOR DISMISSAL 11/07/2011 NV..."

That shows SOMETHING ended up before a court. You wanna say that's not a settlement, I'm afraid you're engaging in a semantics exercise. It has the same effect.

 

In point of fact, it's utterly amazing the "coin doctors" in the original complaint weren't CRIMINALLY charged, especially on the matters of "puttied" coins and "rebuilt" FH Standing Liberty quarters. It's fraud no matter how one slices it. I've SEEN what those coins turned into after a number of years. To borrow a term from Laura - DRECK!

NOBODY'S hands were clean - not the dealers, not PCGS. As for PCGS being "the standard", I don't believe it now, I've never believed it, and it's not very likely I ever will. The whole idea is bull. The only part that's true is, "PCGS has the market power to make our fellow 'unindicted co-conspirators' act like we're better, and convince the morons with money that we are, and at the end, that's all that matters."

 

If one can talk about things by "feel" rather than conclusions based on known fact, I have the "feel" that such doctoring was generally accepted (if quietly) practice in the hobby for higher-end coins at one time or another. PCGS (and it would be remiss not to mention NGC, which hasn't happened much in this thread....) at one point tended to just roll with the accepted practice. Don't forget, the people who founded those TPG's came from the ranks of higher-end dealers, movers and shakers in numismatics....

I have no firm knowledge because I've never been able to afford to play in that pool, but we can look today at the still-general acceptance of dipping at the TPG level as an indicator that altering a coin towards a more-original appearance isn't/wasn't necessarily considered disqualifying. Like many other manifestations of morality, numismatic morality evolves as time passes.

Then, at some point, things changed. I have to wonder what role the founding of CAC might have played....enmities we'll never know about may have been created, and played out in the form of this legal action.

Evaluating things like this, when one will never know the full story or even enough of it to fill in the blanks, is always a game of probabilities. Probabilities have no relationship whatsoever to certainties. And it may be personal prejudice peaking through, but it's simply not possible for me to assign altruistic tendencies to PCGS, then or now. It could well have been simply the financial and reputational damage caused to PCGS by the fools who leveraged their guarantee policy against them; Heaven knows that would be enough for me in their position.

All the fact we have is that PCGS went to war with a certain subset of the dealer community, and the strong indication that it resolved due to a realization (perhaps, indeed likely, known all along) that a court decision would not produce any winners. Unless somebody with an inside connection publishes an expose, we'll never know, and even such a document would have to be taken with a grain of salt since everyone has an agenda, be it benign or not.

Certainly fun to talk about, though, as the last half-dozen pages have proved.

 

Yeah they sure are very technical in their jargon. I was looking at it from an economics standpoint as to the players' actions, as my specialty speak is only in economics and (philosophy of) logic lol.

OK, those are the examples I was looking for. Where does one read up on puttied coins and look at rebuilt FH quarters? I Googled it but articles are not as easy to come by. I wonder if I can tell - maybe some of my raw coins were altered so that'll be good to learn.

 

At least Kurt is upfront and honest about his hatred and bias towards them. I doubt you would think it was okay if people just started saying "well I have no evidence about this but I feel...." about you at work or your community while making big accusations against you. Point being these rumors and accusations have existed for years on the internet yet no one has ever produced hard proof. Until hard proof comes out they're just ugly rumors at best.

There's already plenty of fake news and conspiracies on the internet, we don't need to be adding to it.

 

It was the right move for PCGS at the time. It was the right move for a lot of people caught not knowing what in the hell they were doing at that time. PCGS was slabbing "doctored" toning, left and right. There was even one guy who did it with the sulfur from wooden matchsticks, getting five for five of those sailing right by them and their "experts." The fact is, this wasn't even a "lawsuit." PCGS was afraid to make it that, because they knew it was frivolous, they knew they couldn't define "coin doctoring." It was rather a complaint that was never served, that just took up space for six months in a clerk's office, doing precisely what it was intended to do, generate a fear against this thing they couldn't define but didn't want anyone to know and still can't define and don't want anyone to know.

 

From all accounts, he was a wonderful man. I never had the chance to meet him.

Books. I'm not sure if these contain those coins specifically (the general US ones may) but here are some good counterfeit detection & explanation books:

American Numismatic Association Certification: Counterfeit Detection
Numismatic Forgery - Charles Larson
Us Gold Counterfeit Detection Guide - Bill Fivaz
The Official Guide to Coin Grading and Counterfeit Detection, 2nd Edition - John Dannreuther
Standard Catalog of Counterfeit and Altered United States Coins - Virgil Hancock

 

Yes. Books. And attending major shows and listening to presentations. Don't expect all good information to be on the web; it's not. At least you're not going to get it with a Google search.

 

I didnt know this lawsuit had anything to do with toning whatsoever. Or was an artificial toner supposed to take this lawsuit (against people who laser and/or build up metal on coins) as a warning that they might also get publicly outted? Perhaps the dippers too? Thats the real tragedy. Nothing was really accomplished. Nothing was clarified. I hear this sniffer is used very infrequently. Im sure a lasered surface can still get by no problem. Just depends on the coin. If I were a doctor, Id focus on lower value coins that probably wont get sniffed (not that it can sniff lasering)...just a farce in my opinion.

 

Lasering was a technique most used with gold proofs, as I understand it. Puttying was both gold and silver, and rebuilding FH quarters was unique to that series. Were/are there also other "doctorings"? Probably. I've seen some rather sketchy looking FSB's in PCGS plastic, not to mention some of the most ridiculous ugly tonings the world has ever seen.

Yes, to me artificial toning IS AS BAD AS ANY other doctoring, and it's almost trivially easy to accomplish, once you delve thoroughly into the chemistry of silver, as any highly experienced darkroom rat has.