War Stories: Your worst coin purchase ever???

I thought it might start an interesting thread if some of you old-timers would share with us newbies your most regretable coin purchase from your years of collecting experience. (i.e. the worst you got ripped off on a coin, bought a counterfeit, or coin that dropped in value, etc.)

Surely some of us newer collectors can learn from your mistakes...which might be the silver lining in your dud coin?

Thanks!

 

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I bought some sets off a Power seller on ebay named SLQMAVEN and the sets were opened and really beat. They looked like they were water damaged.

I shipped them back and asked for either a refund or a replacement and the guy went nuts over it and actually gave me negative feedback. He was foul and rude, and bottom line was that I lost my set and my money.

All because I mentioned the coin dealers name in my negative feedback in return.Ebay removed my neg and his stuck on me. The guy had the coins and my money and I got a negative and a lesson learned on ebay.

This guy has loads of positives but loads of negatives as well and when reading them they all sounded like my issue with him as well.

WATCH FEEDBACK ON DEALERS, WHETHER THEY SOLD 40 OR 40,000 ITEMS.

 

Howdy,

Easy. Our 3rd grade teacher started us all collecting pennies. 1 a year - go to the bank, etc. Back then (I'm 58) you could still occasionally find an indian sort of like you can find a wheatie today. I quickly got into this and got my whitman albums and progressed to dates.

Found a 22 plain but like many this had just a hint of a D if you looked at it closely under the right light. No problem, I used my boy scout knife to scatch it clean.

er, is this enough of a war story? ;-)

Now, I do have to tell about getting a 21D walker in change on my paper route ~VG-F. Cool. Took it to the coin show and sold it for $50 and bought my first pair of skis (head's). Hey, I collected penny's and nickels and dimes and didn't really collect halves.

peace,

rono

 

lemmyk:
Why not file a complaint against him and demand a refund?

 

Exactly, exhaust every means available, even now. Make Ebay & Paypal tired of hearing your name. That's how I got my money back from a Chinese dealer who sold me a bunch of American/Chinese Morgans...

Take Care
Ben

 

cc

The worst I've done that I can remember (I have a horrible memory!) was at a small coin show I went to. I was looking for Morgans to fill some holes, but I could nto find any I wanted. I just had to buy a coin so I spotted a 78 CC so I checked my price guides I printed off from ecoinprices and decided the price was fair. When I got in my car after the show I double checked the price from my three year old redbook and said oops.
After I got home I checked completed auction listings and reallized I payed about twice what it was selling for. The coin is only F to VF so I wasn't out a lot but I was still bummed a little.
Normally the ecoinprices guide is only a couple bucks high but in this case it was way off.
Lesson learned, stay with your game plan and get a better handle on current prices.

 

I have to admit that so far I've been luckier than I have a right to be considering the level of knowledge I had about some of the purchases I've made in the past. A local coin dealer ripped me off pretty badly when I was a kid collecting indian head cents. The dollar amount of the loss wasn't that great, but it damaged my interest in the hobby at the time once I found out what the coins were selling for elsewhere. Perhaps if the dealer was more honest in the small transactions, I would have eventually gone back for larger ones as my purchasing power permitted.

 

You betcha.

My only bad deal was for a nice 20c piece for my type set. Bought it on E-bay. Dude never delivered.

I hounded him, E-Bay, and PayPal. Eventually, I got all my money back - piecemeal, but I did get it back.

Other than that, I have been happy.

 

could small claims court help you ?

 

The price amount was not worth it, Paypal and ebay told me that. It got to the point where it was totally the principle of the issue. That this guy who sells so many coins and sets would fight me for a total under fifty bucks!

You (I) would think that his reputation would just not be worth fighting with a small timer like myself.

Also, once I sent the sets back to him (out of anger) telling him that I don't want his junk, he denied receiving them and my evidence was now gone, yes I know my fault and that was stupid, but it was one of my early ebay experiences but it didn't deter me. It was actually the only bad experience on ebay, and I have made over 300 plus purchase of coins and sets with many different dealers and regular people.

But again by that time I was only interested in the principle of the issue and being ripped off by a crooked dealer, like everywhere in life you run into jerks.

 

I bought a coin lot on eBay described as

30 Queen Victoria pennies, all F or plus.

I paid $70, guess what ?

They were all aG lol...

 

Hey Phillydog, from from I understand about this guy was he was based in Nevada then moved to Colorado and guess what here is based right here in our neck of the woods, above me up in Quakertown Pa.

Weird karma......I wonder if he has a storefront business or does he just jump state to state?

I'd love to visit his store if he has one, just to say Hi!

 

my war story is with some notes i bought

a tad of topic but .... my worst story is about a drop in value. I normally wait it out till prices settle down before making a purchase off the secondary market. But this note, a 2003A star note from k district was gleeming at me. I checked the printing numbers and only 320,000 were printed. In the terms of notes where millions upon millions are printed, 320k is nothing. The notes were going for about $100+ EACH. i was lucky (cough cough) at the time to get the 2 sequentially numbered notes form just a hair shy of $100 EACH. At the time i was very excited about winning the notes because our Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snow announced his retirement. With a new Secretary of the Treasury, we would be getting a new series of notes. This meant that they would not be able to mint any more of the 2003A K district star notes. So when i bought these 2 notes, i thouhgt i was so smart, and felt very proud of myself.

Well, the Bureau of Printing is taking its sweet time in getting the 2006 (maybe 2007) series notes with the signature of the new Secretary of the Treasury printed. So, while waiting for the new series to be printed, they printed more of the 2003A k district notes. And not just a few either =( so my notes will effectively drop form the 100 range to maybe 10 (give or take) of course only time will tell their true value

 

Check it out, here is a nifty tool to check users feedback on ebay, my guy comments that mirror mine for years:

http://www.toolhaus.org/

What I mean is the guy who ripped me off ( SLQMAVEN ) negs from othesr mirror exactly what I had said about him. I wish I had this tool a couple years ago.

 

My tale of woe involves some coins I didn't buy.

Driving down the street I spotted a sign "Estate Sales" outside a carpet and rug store, so I stopped and asked whether he had any coins. He told me he had a bag of silver coins from Iran, but they weren't at the store. We made arrangements for me to come back a few days later, and with 19th & 20th Century Krause volumes in hand, so I did.

The first thing he said to me when I returned was "Some of them were pretty dirty, so I polished them up for you."

 

There is an antique shop near me that always has a few morgan and peace dollars near the register. I explain to them whenever I go there that the coins would be worth more if they would stop cleaning them, but they never listen. Maybe for their customer base, this makes it easier to sell them.

 

The worst I ever got burned was buying coins in hawaii, there was this shop at the mall and they were going out of business. Well I ended up buying about $50 worth of Liberty nickels in g/vg then finding out that they were only worth $15. I made a few other bad buys when I came back into the hobby during those years in hawaii, but I never lost out big, except for the 1872 2c in F-12 on a bid board for $55 that I didn't have the money for

 

I wish you had posted this earlier!!! I bought something from the same seller 3 months back... (a prestige proof set) and the set looked like someone had opened it up and coughed on the coins multiple times... 100s of spots on the coins... and I couldnt return the set. Yet considering the price - it wasnt a horrendous ripoff, I just wished I paid $5 more and got something decent.
The moderators might know, is there a post containing a list of fishy eBay sellers?

 

The toolhaus link has been posted many, many times at CoinTalk. I myself have posted it at least a half dozen times.

Again, there have been many, many posts concerning specific dealers. However, CoinTalk does not maintain a database of those dealers, especially as doing so could result in legal problems for Peter.

Bottom line -

First, before buying from any seller on EBay for the first time, always run him/her/it through toolhaus. Even if the feedback is 100%, toolhause will show you any neutrals that have been posted, and many people give neutrals on the (sometimes incorrect) assumption that they won't get a retaliatory neg. Some positives, when read, turn out to be negs, but the only way to find those is to read every feedback entry.

Second, before buying from any seller, EBay or otherwise, for the first time, use the forum search function (top of every page) to look for old threads regarding the seller.

Finally, if those steps haven't decided you either for or against doing the deal, ask for help in deciding by posting a query in Coin Chat, US Coins, or World & Ancient, whichever one you feel is appropriate. ​

 

I think if I was to answer this question as though we are only going by coin appreciation, then my answer would have to be all of the coins I bought with high mintages and in low grades over the years. Complete collections of more recent low grade coins are probably a poor purchase, but only if you look at it as an investment.

I think if you buy this way for the love of collecting then it doesn't matter, but to be honest this would be what I consider as a worst coin purchase. The best coin purchase today would be any of the moderns under 15,000 mintage in MS69 or higher [Silver commemoratives under 50,000 mintage].