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Message:: [QUOTE="jloring, post: 1753549, member: 15518"]Believe me Doug, it was public, and I was a member (and I joined by just clicking "join group"). At one time they had thousands of members, but paranoia set in, and they announced they were making the group private and purging the membership. This was about six years ago I believe (maybe longer). Their founder (eBay ID "barnowl") went and got himself into hot water with eBay, and he was NARU'd. The site (eBay) was different back then... anyone could email bidders, and that's what the membership of this group was doing. If (and that's a "big IF") they thought a coin was a fake (and was listed as genuine), certain members would alert the bidder. Now this may seem like a great idea to most.... however, eBay considered it "auction interference" and issued warnings to the group to cease. They didn't, and all it took was a few instances of genuine coins being declared "fake" by the group. It wasn't long after that eBay changed policy and hid bidder's IDs. There's a wealth of information in the group's threads... information that is no longer available to the casual user. It's really no different than a CT member linking an eBay auction on this site, declaring the coin fake. But because they described in detail exactly what was wrong with the coin, the belief was that counterfeiters were somehow infiltrating the group and using the information posted there to improve the quality of their fakes.[/QUOTE]