Another burglary . . . this time it was Barry Stuppler's shop.

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-facial-recognition-coins.html

 

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that needs to change, and so do pawn shops.

 

great just what we need, another service to send our coins to.....

 

It is not expensive but the answer is everyone. It will be part of doing business. It would be a nominal cost. It can even be free or sponsored as an extension of the current databases with TPGs. Lets not make it sound like an expensive or difficult thing to do, because it is not. It would be less expensive to run than this forum. How is this paid for?

 

It should be more or less part of the transaction at the cash register? The picture is for ID, not showing to friends or posting on cointalk. Any Cellphone can do it in seconds.

 

How much does a collection need to be worth before it is worth insure? Poor people are not allowed to collect coins and not have them robbed and hocked at the local coin dealer or on Amazon? What is the cost of insuring a collection that might be vallued at $20K. Insurance is really BS. Coins are so readily stolen that insurance for coins is ridiculously expensive, requires thousands invested in security, and in the end, the still refuse to pay full value on coins. CLEARLY insurance is not a solution to coin theft. It probably adds to the problem.

 

Man, the spirit of what you suggest is good, but the execution of an all-encompassing system for tens of millions of collectible coins will never happen. It would require strict buy-in from all parties to every single transaction with loopholes all over the place, too many to count, but here’s a few: Take a white MS66 Washington quarter out of its holder and try to “track it.” They all look more or less the same. Fingerprinting tech? You wouldn’t find any fingerprints on a raw coin unless it was being mishandled. Coins change ownership over and over over the course of one coin show- do you really think every dealer is going to take out his cell phone and check the database every single time? Noble of an idea as it may be, it just won’t happen, so no one is going to invest in building the infrastructure for a fundamentally flawed system.

I think a more realistic solution would be to integrate a database the Numismatic Crime Information Center uses with the TPG apps so that if you scanned a stolen coin or looked up the cert, it would put up a flag that the coin was reported stolen. As someone mentioned, the check there would be making sure that only coins verified stolen with a police report would enter that system (Again, someone has to pay for the administrative burden to do the back-end work even on a much smaller scale like this idea.) but at the very least if you’re viewing coins on eBay or at auction, it could yield progress.

Problem is, before TPG’s would agree to do that they would need to be absolutely certain that the data of a third-party organization (NCIC) was rock solid, and determine if implementing that could result in lawsuits for them if errors ruined a big sale of a legitimate item or something. (Which means more project teams being created, more employees, more $$$ spent, more risk...etc.)

Bottom-line: A very complex problem given the absolutely massive scale of a zillion collectible coins floating around out there, but definitely still room for growth and progress.

 

that aspect is useless. The police don't cooperate and they don't take reports that list individual coins. You don't need a police report to verify something was stolen. It is enough that someone makes a claim that it was stolen with any reasonable evidence. If reports can't be made by victims, it is a USELESS endeavor and it just plays into the hands of the theives, and the dealers that work with them.

This is EXACTLY what you don't want. This is pandering to the theives. This is what you want to END.

 

See this is typical. This is a spread sheet made by the victem, not the cops. The cops are not going to hang around and go over receipts and make an exhaustive listing of 3000 stolen coins

http://numismaticcrimes.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Stuppler-Breakin32221.xlsx

Cops do not cooperate at all.

 

So the person who has a vendetta against a known dealer can get a falsified entry into your system that some specific coin that dealer is trying to sell is stolen without any verifiable (police report) proof?

You're looking at some major legal liability with a system like that.

 

We must have safe or gun experts here....these heavy-duty gun safes that I see that weigh 500-1,000 pounds...they have to provide some major protection, no ? These usually cost < $1,000 or so.

There might even be stronger ones. I'll bet mansion owners and the super-rich have safes costing $5,000 - $20,000 that have 3-6" thick walls and can't be moved by people.

You get something like that in your home or business, unless professionals work on the safe for an hour or more, they're not gonna get in.

 

why stop there. build a bunker. You never know when the Russians of the chinese or an Islamic fundementalist will let go of the big one.

 

A coin shop in my state is located on the third floor of a large bank!

 

The thickness of the doors and walls of the safe are a huge misleading security feature. The cheaper manufacturers like to tout the door and wall thickness. What's much more critical to the security of the safe is the thickness of the steel used to construct the safe.

3", 4", 5" thick doors using 18 gauge steel can be broken into in under 3-4 minutes by a determined thief. The thickness of those doors are created by the space between the front door panel and the inner door panel where the locking mechanism resides.

Now build that same 3" or 4" door using 10 gauge or 1/4" steel and you've got much more protection. The same thing goes with the side, back and top of the safe.

Bolting the safe to the concrete slab in a basement is even more important. If that's not possible then a fallback mounting to the house framing is second best.

There are lots of other parameters to building a quality safe. Look up Fort Knox safes. Those are very nice quality for break-in and fire protection.

 

For most of these thefts, we don't know where the items were taken: display case....portable safe....big safe.

 

Sudden uptick with this kind of stuff, and then Colorado the other day!

These guys are making up for isolating themselves all of 2020 sounds like.
Terrible.

 

Yes and the cops wouldn’t do that because..... logistics/time constraints/resource allocation/budget restrictions. All realities that would come into play in any solution for this as unfortunately there is no magic fix.

This conversation is food for thought though, because there have to be ways the industry can creatively leverage technology advancements to do more in this area for victims of numismatic theft, in certified coins at the least.

 

I might be wrong but chances are they will be on Ebay or Amazon soon and the "crooks" might get busted, I sure hope so.