Demos Auctions - a New Auction House, and a New Creation by NSB/Zeus?

Hi all!

I was browsing Biddr today, and stumbled across Demos Auctions - a seemingly brand new auction site. I was wondering if it was a new creation by Zeus/NSB, as all the coins are photographed similarly, start at the same price (as NSB), and sell a similar quality and quantity of coins.

Their website is also brand new, and in a lot of the pages, has a stock Wordpress script (Wordpress is a website creation site)

On Biddr: https://www.biddr.com/auctions/demos/browse?a=1648
Website: https://demos-auctions.com/

However, there are differences in the descriptions of the coins, so maybe this is just a brand new auction house?

Any thoughts?

 

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Their website is a joke.

"Our team and numismatists have been in the coin world for many years."

https://demos-auctions.com/our-team/

 

Says they have past auctions #1-40 but when you click on any it leads straight back to auction 1

 

Not sure if it is another creation from Zeus/NSB, could be.
Next to what @Herodotus mentions, what I find misleading is that on their website they present very expensive coins from other auction houses, even using their images (are they even allowed to do that? Copyright is my first thought).
They present it like they were the ones selling these coins...



From Roma Numismatics:

https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=lot&sid=2451&lot=348



Also from Roma:

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=1099206

 

Could the whole thing be a scam?

Win a coin and pay, and then end up getting nothing while the website creators obscond with your money?

 

I really like the owl design in their logo...

 

Well, yes.
The three firms all have home pages outside biddr. The one of Zevs is also a word press site:
http://zeusnumismatics.com/

Zevs states that they have been in business since 2010. They had their first auction on biddr in November 2019.


On the home page of NSB, they «claim to own one of the world’s richest ancient coin collections diversified in different centuries in history. We continue to share our knowledge and expertise with ancient coin lovers since 2012.» How about that. They didn’t start their auctions on biddr before 10th of October, 2020 though. I don’t know how they operated prior to that.
http://nbsauctions.com/
The links on the site takes you nowhere. They must have been busy sorting out that huge collection since 2012.
I realize that I linked to «nbs» auctions, not NSB. According to this reddit-thread, that is because NSB is the «abbrevation for the nazi party in netherlands»:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AncientCoins/comments/l1ws15/nsbnbszeus_auction_house/

Demos Auctions is new to me, and I don’t know if there is any affiliation with the other two though.

Has anyone ever talked to one of their consignors, to hear their experience with these firms? I’ve only heard from buyers, and have been a buyer on both Zevs and NSB myself, but never read any experience from a consignor. As NSB only has a 3% buyers fee, one would think that the larger part of the fee is payed by the consignor?

 

I emailed Zeus about consigning some coins a while a go (it was just a bunch of Tetricus and Victorinus antoninianii that I was interested in selling because most similar coins go for about £10-£15 each from them). However, they didn't get back to me - not so much as an automated response.

It made me wonder if they were actually an auction house that has their own suppliers, rather than an auction house that you could consign to

 

I wouldn't be so certain that they accept consignments from collectors.

If you look at what they have on offer, you can see a pattern. About all Greek bronze and fractional silver, Roman provincial, Byzantine, and medieval coins they sell were minted in a limited number of regions that nowadays are part of Turkey. Since these coins were produced for local circulation, it seems reasonable to assume that they have been found relatively close to their places of origin. None of the coins have any discernable collection provenance. Many of them appear to have recently undergone similar methods of cleaning and/or artificial repatination (orange "sand patina"). All of this also applies to the coins that Zevs and NSB have sold in the past.

This makes me suspect that these auction houses are front companies for an operation that exclusively or almost exclusively trades in coins recently excavated in and exported from Turkey. Turkish law restricts the export of antiquities, which raises doubts about the legality of these firms' business.

I want to highlight that all of this is guesswork, and I cannot prove any of it. Yet, what I see in their online catalogues rings enough alarm bells for me to not even consider buying from them.

 

The owner of these companies is a member here on CT. I just wanna tell you to be careful. Make your research. He had some problems on Forvm with many members in the free coin auctions...

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/zeus-numismatics.358119/page-4#post-4557951

 

All I have to say is I really think the "we're just the platform" attitude is not good enough.

 

I have always been happy with biddr and their services. I think they do a good job of keeping class high end auction houses as well as some more affordable ones.
I recently had an auction house that forgot to mail out my winnings. I had emailed them a couple of times and received no response. I then emailed biddr from their contact us at the bottom of the site, asked them to get in touch with the house. Within minutes I received a response that they had done just as requested. Just a few minutes later I received an email from the house apologizing and letting me know what happened.
Not sure what people expect biddr to do for them on top of providing a top notch bidding platform? But my two cents is that they are doing a good job.

 

The DEMOS auction terms on Biddr say “We send all our parcels and letters with the Polish Post Office.”

The Internet name registery, https://www.whois.com/whois/demos-auctions.com , says the web host demos-auctions.com was registered by someone from ŚLĄSKIE. The English translation for that is “Silesian Voivodeship”, which Wikipedia has informed me is a province in southern Poland.

 

"In the future, everyone will be a world-famous auctioneer for 15 minutes."
- A.W.

 

First of all, thank you Ryro for your post! It's nice to hear some positive feedback for a change.

I've contacted DEMOS and informed them that their unfinished website and the placeholder information/images used are causing some raised red flags. I've recommended that they either take down the website as long as it's not ready or at least remove the placeholder data.

For everyone's piece of mind: DEMOS is located in Poland, not the Netherlands, and while the company is new, the owner has been in the coin business for many years. I am sure that more than a few here on CT have bought coins from him before.

@OutsiderSubtype: You should moderate your tone real quick. I am not obligated to read and post here on the forum. I do this to quickly identify problems and help solve them. If some here get the impression that we had to justify ourselves to them, I will close my account and ignore this forum entirely.

 

For everyone's peace of mind, of course. Sorry for that

 

Similar issues occur with the auction house NBS.

I was curious a while back about the truth of the sites claims...I could not find any other information about the employees listed online. The images given for the employees on the site are all stock photos...after bidding with the auction house, the person who I mailed with and paid was not any of the people listed on the site. Its not a great look when an auction house makes claims about age which can't be verified and features "employees" who either are totally fabricated or supplemented with false photos. All of this intrigue really makes it seem like the auction house has something to hide...

 

A couple of thoughts:
1. I’m glad @acsearch.info is on the forum, to pick up these real or imagined challenges.
2. We should work towards objectivity and avoid libelous comments. I’m working on this myself, and know I’m not a shining example.
3. Open and serious discussion about how to keep the hobby legal should be encouraged.

I have been worried lately about the level of trust I can allow myself to have towards certain dealers and to what extent they are vetted by the platforms that present them. I’ll do my best to vote with my feet, and to not only know the coin, but also know more about the dealer for the future. As for the near future, I’ll be supporting my local b/m coin shops for a while, until I feel more secure about what kind of enterprises I’m funding.

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what does acsearch have to do with biddr or any of the other auction platforms? I thought they're only an archive.

 

Hi All,

I alerted them to one incorrect attribution (the coin was from Cyprus not Lebedus). That's not a sin, it's a boo-boo.

- Broucheion