So this week at our monthly coin club meeting one of our members shared with the group his concern about a Scratch and Win coin program from The American Mint. I've placed the material on our clubs website as a Collector Beware type article, and will probably do so as more of these are shared with the group. You can see it here: http://munciecoinandstampclub.com/i...club-education-beware/32-scratch-and-win-scam. The hope here is to educate and keep people from spending exorbitant amounts of money on worthless items claiming to be value numismatics. Also attempting to educate the novice on what things like Gold Plated!!! really means. My point here isn't to discuss the finer points of whether or not this sort of thing is right or wrong for these companies to do this (take advantage of uneducated collectors and buyer), or if its fraud or whatever...that point is argued enough here. What I'm attempting to discuss here is that I don't think you'd have to go to far in proving that any numismatic business, be it a dealer, publication, TPG, etc...would quickly warn its customers that this type of product has no monetary or numismatic value. It wouldn't be hard to prove that any numismatist would consider these types of "coins" or coin programs as throwing your money away, and thus predatory on the part of whomever is attempting to sell you the product. Not everyone gets one of these int he mail. This is a form of direct marketing. I know a bit about direct marketing, the one thing you don't do is spend the money to send this material to folks who don't collect coins. That's just money being thrown away. NO, you send it directly to potential customers, people who actually collect coins. Potential customers who you actually have a chance at getting their attention because its something they are interested in. Your target audience. So how do you go about finding the addresses and names of your target audience yet not waste money sending it to people who aren't interested in this type of thing? In the past I've doen some of my own direct marketing for real estate. You send letters and flyers to folks who you know are real estate investors. How do you get that information? You start with getting their names and addresses from other sources of known real estate investment outlets who will sell or give you their addresses. The same is true for this stuff. But here's the rub. Who is going to have my name and address when it comes to numismatic offerings. I'll tell ya who....PCGS, NGC, ANA, Coin World, etc...some of the biggest and most trusted names in numismatics have my name and address. If I'm going to send a direct marketing piece to someone who I know will turn their head to look at my material, I get that information from someone who's already got my customer's numbers. I'm going to go to a PCGS or the ANA and ask..."hey, how much you willing to sell me your customer list for." Companies like NGC, Coin World, etc., can make money just on the information they hold on you as their customer. It's pretty valuable. Yet, these same companies are going to be the ones who tell you that these programs are predatory and the items aren't worth anything. I have no proof that these folks get their customer lists from the ANA or a company like PCGS...but I would not be surprised if that is where they get it. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if a company as well known and trusted as PCGS would actually be able to plausibly deny that they are feeding this information to a predatory marketer by having a sister company or paying a third party to manage their customer information for them, and that's who actually sells it to these people. It seems like the whole things is self perpetuated and the only losers are the buyer who buy it hook line an sinker. I know I could probably state this better with more words or if I thought this out more. I'm not sure if I'm making my point here, but I've rambled on enough. I just feel that the responsibility for this stuff ultimately leads back to the businesses who would condemn this stuff in the first place and feel that ultimately they have the responsibly to fight this by not sharing this type of customer information. I know this kind of thing has always been around and will never go away...but it just eats at me some times.
It is...sorry...tried to say it in as few words as possible....you aren't missing anything by not reading it...LOL
@phankins11 its good you warn your coin club. Do any of them get a Littleton Coin catalog? They have these same type offers inside their catalog. The we'll send you a product every month for life for the low introductory price of $.99 +$4.95 shipping is as old as dirt.
You are also right that you can trust no one to not sell your personal information. You would think the retailer would keep your info confidential so it wouldn't get in the hands of their competitors. But, I guess selling your info is worth more than your loyalty to their services or products.
On your coin clubs website might want to fix this 'Don't get rippted off!' it's on the right hand side under the advertisement. Some other companies that sell your data are credit card companies, even your bank. Buy a coin with your CC from someplace and they probably use computer programs to sort you onto so and so customer list they then sell.
There's a way to help solve this problem. For many of you, it's too late, but over time, try this. Use different middle initials each time you deal with a numismatic entity. For Coin World, maybe Jack H. Smith; for ANA, Jack R. Smith; for PCGS, maybe Jack T. Smith, etc. Eventually you find out who's selling your name to whom. I'll take it a step further. I support a disabled veterans' group. One day I got a letter from another veterans' group. Under circumstances I won't go into here, that seemed strange. So I replied to them with a different middle initial. Three months later, I started getting a FLOOD of mail from do-gooders, including one from the Philippines, using the bogus middle initial. No doubt at all they had sold my name. Won't say what I did, but they CERTAINLY didn't like it, and it probably cost them a good deal of money. You can work out your own version of this strategy, it feels GOOOOOOOOD to vent your spleen every now and then.
