conscience vs desire

On EBay are two medals that are very badly listed and, if real, the medals could be worth far more than they would receive now. These medals combined could be worth about $2000 and as it stands now may go for three to four hundred dollars if not less. I would like to buy them, but can I really live with myself after taking advantage of another person's mistake?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

How about this, buy it for the three to four hundred, then contact the seller and say you would like to add a certain amount to the final price. It depends on your conscience, but you can even ask to add $1600 to the $400 you`re supposed to pay. That is if you lose to your conscience. Hope you`ll win though, and be happy about the good purchase, thats what all other buyers do.

 

I would buy them and if they end up being real and worth way more than you paid, you could contact the seller and let them know the deal and take it from there. I wouldn't do anything until you get them and can confirm it - what if they're not real and you offered way more for something than it's worth.

 

I say buy buy buy and don't worry about it....they obviously didn't buy them or they would know what they were worth......you never know either, the price could shoot up towards the end of the auction to a more respectable number....there could be snipers waiting in the wings right now.

 

Are you joking? If you win at the highest bid, even if much less than the items true value, is a risk the seller chose to take. This is what an AUCTION is... a roll of the dice. It is not as if you are conning some old lady as the only potential buyer and lying about value.

 

If you're adding them to your collection and don't plan on selling soon be thankful for your good fortune. If you're planning on flipping them to make a buck, let your conscience be your guide.

 

I am not joking about this. I like to deal with people fairly especially on financial matters. I do like the answer if I want this for my collection not to worry about it. One medal I drooled over. The other medal I have looked at but always found it more than I could afford. I will let you know in a few days what happened.

 

Since I collect medals, you have piqued my curiosity about them, but don't worry, I'm not one to take unfair advantage of another person from the forums by bidding against them. If you win, please post photos.

Chris

 

Well, I will tell you a story. There was an auction on Ebay once, and was listed at $200 for 68 coins. Poor photos, and the story was this was the man's wife's uncles coins. No one bid on the auction at all. I emailed them, and after convincing myself they were telling the truth, I gambled and bought them.

Another story was a man listing his collection on Ebay, all in 2x2's. About 150 coins and I bought it for about $120.

The second auction was a scam, a bunch of junk he had put into 2x2's to make it look valuable, and the first one was great. Either way, I was taking a great risk by buying. In one case I won, the other I lost. If you win the auction and benefit, you deserve it as you are taking a risk that instead of $2000 these medals are worth nothing.

Chris

 

The key words I'm reading here are "if real" and "could be worth". So you're bidding and there's nothing confirming your or anyone else's belief of what they are. Somebody else may be thinking the same as you. Let the bids fly! Where ever it ends it ends. Sounds like a gamble to me. You'll either win or lose. This story unfolds on ebay on a daily basis.

I know people who make a hobby of buying stuff cheap off of people and re-selling for 2, 3x if not more. You ever watch American Pickers? It's good to have a conscience but sometimes it's just business. It's an open auction and you're competing against everyone else. Whatever the ending price is, is completely out of your control. Whether it's too high or too low, I suppose fate will decide. I say go for it.

 

Agreed. It's not like you're buying silver dollars from an old lady at face value.

 

You are taking a risk because of the questionable authenticity, meaning the lower bid is reasonable and all the sellers can expect. Just like anything else for sale, the sellers could have made their product more appealing to buyers and realized a higher price.
Good luck and let us know when the auction ends.

 

This is the main medal I was talking about. I can not be sure if the medal is genuine, but even if it is electrotype it is probably worth more than I paid for it. In the Stack Bowers and Heritage auctions, the genuine medal went for 3 to 6 times what I paid for it.

 

What I don't understand is that the goal of bidding on an auction is to get something as cheap as possible. Why bid on an auction if you don't want to pay as low as possible? It defeats the purpose of the auction.

 

Actually, I paid about a fourth of what the medal maybe is worth (according to the Stacks and Heritage auctions). Today the seller had changed the listing to auction or BIN The price was acceptable and I snatched it up. I could have tried for much less in the auction, but I was bound to be sniped. Why take a chance.

 

Change your paradigm. You assume the medals are worth $2000, it's the wrong assumption.

The medals are only worth what someone is willing to pay, if that happens to be $400 then that is what they are worth. What some book says, or what some dealer has them listed for, is irrelavent to the questions of value. The market sets the value.

 

One of my favorite eBay sellers listed a set of seven "employee appreciation" rounds, "composition unknown." They looked like silver, but had no markings, which generally means they aren't silver. 7-day return policy.

I Googled around for them, and the only thing I found was an eBay auction where one was listed as ".999 silver". But the auction was ended early, and there was no feedback, so no way to tell whether the description was accurate.

I won the medals at $51. When I got them, they each weighed exactly 1 troy oz, and they were dimensioned right to be solid silver. I decided they looked good enough to risk digging into the edge of one (i.e. I decided not to return them); that didn't reveal a different color.

I ended up getting them tested at a recent show; .999. I sold them for $220. (That was about 10% below spot, a bit below par. Another guy was offering $33.30/ozt for .999, $1 below spot, but wouldn't touch something that wasn't marked for content.)

Do I owe the seller anything? I think not. The seller chose to list them as-is, rather than getting them tested. I chose to bid on the chance that they were silver, and gambling that, if they weren't, I would be able to determine that non-destructively and return them. (If the seller offers a seven-day return policy, I see no ethical issue with this, either.) This seller runs a pretty high volume, and has presumably determined that it works better to list high volumes with minimal attention to each item, rather than spending the time to optimize each listing.

I work pretty hard not to take advantage of people, including offering to let people off the hook when I pounce on a BIN that's way out of line with actual value. But if something is listed as an open auction, I figure that the seller is happy to let the crowd price it, and I have no ethical qualms about winning it at any closing price. If the description is poor enough to make bidding a gamble, the closing price will reflect that risk, and it's not up to bidders to "make it right".

 

Like the movie "Trading Places" taught us all.. buy low, sell high. That's the open market, if the person selling didn't educate themselves, that's not your fault and you shouldn't feel guilty about it, especially in an auction format. You take chances selling your stuff in auction, that's how the games are played.

I bet this person who sold these medals likely didn't pay anything for them (inherited) or perhaps paid half the price you paid for them. They likely won as well in making profit from them.

 

What bothers me is that the seller has only sold two items on EBay. The medal was listed very badly, and he wanted to sale them to buy toys for his kids (someone had given these medals to the kids). I suspect this seller was seeing no one bidding and placed a buy it now onto the medal. I did pounce on the BIN because it is the only way I could have afforded to buy this medal.

 

So, the seller won regardless. They got medals as gift, didn't want them, wanted toys instead. So seller got paid, probably bought toys for kids. Everyone won, nothing to feel bad about.