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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Valentinian, post: 2740778, member: 44316&quot;]Welcome, [USER=86815]@Dafydd[/USER] . </p><p>There are very many genuine coins at coin shows. They vastly outnumber the fakes. But, collectors have little use for fakes so they tend to stay for sale. Any dealer who buys collections will pick up some occasionally. Many are just tourist fakes or museum reproductions bought by someone&#039;s father or grandfather on a trip to Italy. The good dealers pull out the fakes and remove them from circulation. However, a small-time dealer with no reputation to protect might decide to offer them at an attractive price and figure out some way to not outright lie about them. </p><p><br /></p><p>If any seller does not guarantee his coins are genuine there is the possibility he is honest but not much of an expert. However, that situation is not the source of most fakes. They are offered by small-time dealers and eBay sellers who offer coins they know, or strongly suspect, are false. Some are outright criminals, but many are offered by people of low morals who cannot pass up the chance to cash in on anything that looks like it might have value. (There are web sites that list eBay fakesellers.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I have a website for beginners</p><p><a href="http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/" rel="nofollow">http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/</a></p><p>and I used to have my e-mail prominently on it. I would regularly get questions of the sort &quot;My dad died and left me this coin. What is it worth?&quot; Usually the answer was &quot;It is a modern fake of such-and-such, worth nothing. I&#039;m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.&quot; Usually (really, more often than not) I would in less than a week see it on eBay as &quot;Coin of such and such&quot; with either no disclaimer or, buried in the description, something like &quot;Sold as is&quot; or &quot;I am not a coin expert, so I can&#039;t guarantee it.&quot; This was so irritating I made my e-mail a lot harder to find.</p><p><br /></p><p>I suppose some of those sellers can live with themselves and claim a dubious sort of honesty by not actually asserting they were genuine (even though they knew they were false.)</p><p><br /></p><p>[USER=86815]@Dafydd[/USER], stick with us and you will discover a great hobby.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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