Counterfeits on eBay?

Just curious if anyone else has notice that jinghuashei no longer has any items listed on eBay.

jinghuashei-multiple-shop-2 also has no items listed on eBay.

evaevatao1008 no longer has any items listed on eBay and no completed items even listed.

huangzei88 has only 2 items and no completed items even listed.

liusongcaicoinshop no longer has any items listed on eBay.

That is a far cry from all of them, but for some reason eBay has put a dent in them.

 

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I don't know if it's one of the sellers that you mentioned, but a couple weeks ago I reported some guy (Chinese-like username) selling fake Trade Dollars. He used some sort of gridded green backdrop to photograph his coins. He was selling CC trades around $110 a pop. I think one of them sold too

 

These guys were pretty much only selling replica coins - although they would send you unmarked counterfeits. jinghuashei was the one written up in Coin World.

 

If these guys are banned from eBay, they'll sure have a heck of a time finding a market that large to sell to.

 

Here is an article written by Susan Headley "Inside a Chinese Coin Counterfeiting Ring"
http://coins.about.com/od/worldcoins/ig/Chinese-Counterfeiting-Ring/index_t.htm


Here are some images from her gallery which illustrate the scope of Jinghuashei's operation:







\

Images courtesy of About.com

 

I only have three words for that......."Fire mission, over".

 

Hey, here's the seller I was talking about rlm.

http://myworld.ebay.com/banjiufa5689-ok/

Some of his listings:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Rare-us-coin-1875-s-Trade-Dollar-/130420412410?pt=Coins_US_Individual

http://cgi.ebay.com/Rare-us-coin-1873-cc-Trade-Dollar-/130420412414?pt=Coins_US_Individual

As you can see they aren't high quality fakes.

 

I'm really not that surprised, it's not all of them but it's a start! I'm sure you've heard that saying the squeaky wheel gets the grease and we've been a squeaky wheel on more than one occasion. I don't visit too many other forums but we had the girl stop by that time named ebayIvanka, or something like that. Who else gets a visit like that? We may not get preferential treatment but they hear us, no doubt about it!!

 

What if a person were to set up an ID and do nothing with it but win counterfeit items with huge bids and then not pay? You wouldn't need a PayPal account, you're not going to pay!

 

I bought about 10 coins from jinghuashei a few months ago , I didn't receive anything after which I contacted him to resend. Now he is no longer registered. Ah well. I have accumulated a rather large collection of fakes from ebay over the years , the sellers you mentions took part in supplying me and others, pieces that were not inscribed "copy" or "replica". I have about 50 or so replicas now , not one bearing the word "copy". I want to see these guys go now, as I fear that time will only aid to harbor greater techniques..

 

Unfortunately I believe the contacts have already been made. The folks who are the big time importers of this garbage have already been put into contact with the minters through EBay or via other means... lets not print a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner just yet.

 

"Mission Accomplished"? I am not sure we have gone much past blast off. If memory serves me right, there used to be 16,000+ replica coins listed on eBay. They are now down to 11,000+

 

My fear from this milestone is that they will step up their game and improve their already-pretty-good fakes to sell to the black market. It's only a matter of time until they get their fakes at 99.9% indistinguishable from the real deal. They've taken a huge hit from this and I highly doubt they'll be giving up with making coins - it's only going to get better for them and worse for us as collectors.

I was pretty sure that Jinghuashei (or some other counterfeiter located in China) bought an authentic Morgan Dollar die from the US. But his Morgans are still turning up in body bags from TPG's. It's obvious that they aren't doing a very thorough job with the weighing out the silver/tungsten/whatever to be pressed and pressing it with the same amount of pressure that was used at the US mint. I've seen plenty of his 'work' and it's very crude, to say the least. I'm convinced that with a little tweaking of their methods, they could produce exact mirror images of just about any coin you could think of in just about any gradable state (even PL or matte examples) with little-to-no way of determining its authenticity. It's not impossible, it's just resourceful.

 

Just curious. What makes you think they "bought an authentic Morgan Dollar die" as opposed to casting and copying?

 

I was wondering that too. With modern techniques with a high grade coin its fairly easy to copy to a die.

As far as I have ever read, no dies have ever left the US mint unless defaced. There may have been theft I am not aware of, but the mint would claim ownership of dies forever if they ever appeared.

 

The Shanghai Mint got a major load of minting equipment around 1923, from machinery which was no longer needed by the Philadelphia Mint facility. Included was the same type of press used to mint Morgans. Jinghuashei ended up getting his hands on this press and employs it in his operation. Reportedly, per Whitman, thus the pressures employed to mint his counterfeit Morgans are within tolerance. Moreover, the silver content of the blank planchets he uses is per spec. It is the dies that he employs that I believe are what gives his specimens away to the TPGs.

 

Good information. I would not think the machinery nowadays would be the limiting factor, not the metal composition, (though in analysis the trace metals won't be right unless he melts real Morgans), its always the dies that are hardest to replicate.

Its a very real fear someday even the experts will not be able to differentiate these coins. I would wager that a state of the art metal fabrication company could faithfully reproduce a Morgan already if they wished. Computer imaging and fabrication is light years from where it was just 10 years ago. Right now it is in the shadow somewhat, but what would happen if a large, well financed Chinese firm wished to do this? It is not against Chinese law I believe.

 

BINGO!

BTW, the metal is 90% silver and 10%copper. Both came from numerous different sources. Anything else in there could be easily added to duplicate whichever mint/year/source desired.

 

Soon we can all afford those cc's!

 

Well, I could be wrong, but I thought the sources had trace elements in the silver that passed through to the coin. A cc was primarily coined from Nevada silver and would have a characteristic inclusion rate of trace minerals. However, nothing that buying up cheap silver dollar cc's and melting them down wouldn't cure.