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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;stldanceartist, post: 8024649, member: 13307&quot;]Have you ever seen a batch of coins come across your desk and thought, &quot;Wait a minute...why exactly are THESE....HERE???&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>I had that happen this afternoon.</p><p><br /></p><p>Went into a LCS to check on some jewelry pieces I picked up today for sterling scrap.&nbsp; The good news is that all the gold was gold and all the potential diamonds were diamonds.&nbsp; The better news is that my mom gets a really cool (and inexpensive) early birthday present.&nbsp; So I&#039;m a good son in that regard.</p><p><br /></p><p>While I was there, the shop owner pulls out a group of coins that they had someone bring in.&nbsp; They wanted to get my opinion on them.&nbsp; Almost immediate my jaw dropped.</p><p><br /></p><p>The group contained:</p><p><br /></p><p>Morocco 1953 100 Francs (silver) UNC</p><p>Morocco 1953 100 Francs (silver) ESSAI (mintage of 1,100 pcs) UNC ++</p><p>Morocco 1947 20 Francs (Cu-Ni) Piefort ESSAI (mintage of 104 pcs) UNC</p><p>Luxembourg 1946 20 Francs (silver) ESSAI (mintage of 50 pcs) UNC ++</p><p>Luxembourg 1946 50 Francs (silver) ESSAI (mintage of 50 pcs) UNC ++</p><p>Egypt 1911 5 Qirsh (silver) UNC UNC ++</p><p>Mexico (Revolutionary - Oaxaca) 1915 2 Pesos (silver/gold) XF/AU (potentially cleaned)</p><p>Mexico (Revolutionary - Oaxaca) 1915 5 Pesos (silver/gold) AU/UNC ++</p><p>French Indochina 1908 1 Piastre (silver) solid AU</p><p><br /></p><p>There were also some ancients included (looked like some were gold) but as I really don&#039;t know much about them, I didn&#039;t do too much looking into them.&nbsp; LCS owner said they looked much nicer than normal and kept asking me what I thought they were worth - to which I had to repeatedly state I didn&#039;t feel comfortable even guessing.</p><p><br /></p><p>All the coins looked genuine to my eye (except I don&#039;t have a lot of experience with the Mexican Revolutionary coins) and were in crappy old plastic (non-PVC thankfully) 2x2 flips.&nbsp; I immediately asked the shop owner for new flips, because most of them were broken to the point where the coins could have easily fallen out.</p><p><br /></p><p>The official story is that a construction worker received them as a gift from someone for whom he previously did a job.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, my question is this:&nbsp; How did a group of really, really uncommon foreign coins end up in the possession of someone who said someone else gave them to him, and has no idea what they&#039;re worth?</p><p><br /></p><p>My first instinct is to question whether they are stolen.&nbsp; My second question is what are the odds of this particular group of coins ending up in some random coin shop on a Wednesday in November and I&#039;m the only person who recognizes what they are (not the owner, not the previous owner, not the LCS owner?)&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Obviously, my third question was if I could buy them were they to become available.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is the kind of group where I feel like I&#039;ll develop an ulcer thinking about them - not only for the reasons I stated above but because I feel like this will just be another example of getting my knowledge &quot;used&quot; by someone else and the coins getting taken to someone else with more money, where if I&#039;d kept my mouth shut the shop would probably have offered them $50 for the group (which is the number they floated to me before they showed me the coins) and then I&#039;d have at least had a chance at buying one or more of them myself.&nbsp; I say this because this has happened to me before - I point out something cool, then someone else gets to benefit off my knowledge and nothing more is ever said about it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Am I making sense here, or just drastically overthinking the situation?&nbsp; What would you have done?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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