hey guys just wanted to alert you that with the ever-increasing price of silver, the market for fakes and overgrades is becoming more and more rampant. case and point can be seen here: 1897-O Morgan Dollar NGA MS66. It's obvious that just by the hype in the auction ("This coin is technically worth nearly $110,000!") that this should be BUYER-BEWARE. I'm interested in hearing your guys' stories on purchasing slabbed coins from eBay. I am starting a resource over at *self advertisement is not allowed except in classified after 10 posts*. and I welcome any of you guys to submit your experiences so we can widen the public domain on this sketchy activity.
I think there also speculations started in the silver market too and therefore you have heard of it on eBay but i think silver has become the gold fro the middle class society as the gold prices are so high that we can only dream of it.
Got two fake silver Half Sols from Peru in a large lot a couple weeks back. People need to really be careful on Ebay. This has been said for years, oh well .
I don't think the high price of silver has anything to do with things like that NGA silver dollar. There were plenty of overgraded coins in fly by night slabs back when silver was $10 an ounce. Same goes for the counterfeits. Silver was much lower two years ago when the Chinese started really ramping up their production of fakes. Even before that, back in the sevenies it was well known that trade dollars had to be checked very carefully because of the number of fakes on the market, and that was when silver was $2 an oz.
Actually - I would think that higher price silver would make producing quality counterfeits more costly and less profitable.
True, unless you start experimenting with lead compositions and such until you find a combination that looks and weighs almost exactly like real silver. There's a lot of science going into counterfeiting these days.
