I recently purchased some coins at a market here in London. The coins were graded by INA(International Numismatic Association) in Europe. I had never heard of them before, but upon further investigation I found that the company did exist from 1994 to 2003. The company specialized in grading US silver coins and some gold coins as well. They utilized premade holders from several companies. Grading was considered to be moderate at best, and the company succumbed to the market because they did not guarantee the grade or authenticity of the coins that they graded. They were also linked to some Chinese made US coins as well which also probably caused their demise. A local coin dealer here told me about them because he had been stuck in the past with some of their coins. Wanted to post in case someone else comes across coins graded by this company! :headbang:
INA International Numismatic Association Hey Alan, Just wanted to respond to your post. I have seen a few of these coins at flea markets here in midwest US as well. A vendor told me that he had heard they were a mail order company that would not only grade coins sent in to them but would sell their own coins. Kinda weird but that might be why they are not in business any longer. Mail order makes sense since I have never been able to look up on the web. Hope this helps in case someone else finds coins slabbed by this company!!
I am not aware of INA, but I would love to acquire an example of their product. I know of two other companies in the UK, one is an authentication service, and they only do the milled coinage no hammered. The do not slab but issue a printed report with the coin. That is Robert Matthew, formerly of the Royal Mint. The other service does use slabs, and pioneered the use of a 1 to 10 point grading scale CGS-UK. I'm assuming that they thought that since everywhere else in the orld runs on a base ten metric system a grading scale of 1 to 100 would make a lot more sense to Europeans than the Americans wierd 1-70 scale and it would be a foot in the door to getting more non-US collectors to accept slabs. Their grading is actually very strict. I suspect if they ad startd a few years earlier when most of the European market was still anti-slab they've have had an easier time of it. CGS-UK was also on of the first to use edge view type slabs. For some reason though they gave up the edgview and went to translucent rings instead. The edge view is only seen on their first generation holders.
INA Graded Coins Hello, I purchased a group of coins from my uncle in 2001 who was stationed in Europe. They were all graded by INA except for two that were graded by CGS. If I remember right the INA graded coins were about 6 morgan dollars, a couple each of the Trade and Seated dollars, a gold coin, and two real early dollars which I think were like a 1797 and a 1798. I sent all of the coins to ANACS to be re-graded. The two coins I remember being most excited about was the 1836 dollar which I think was referred to as a Galbrecht and the two early dollars. As it turned out, all the coins came back as genuine except for the 1836 and the 1797. Two of the others also came back as cleaned. I sold all of these coins a couple years ago, and I sold the 1836 and 1797 to a coin dealer to use as a training tool for collectors in his club. I just collect gold coins now for investment and only if they are graded by PCGS or NGC. From my experience, most third party graded coins is a mixed bag of real and questionnable coins. Every purchase is an adventure.
