About 8 years ago I created a spreadsheet with some of my better coins to keep track of their "retail" value according to numismedia. I have been updating this about every 6 months ever since just to keep track of their presumed retail value. I enter the certification # and it gives me the value. This morning after entering only 12 #'s I get this message "Your lookup activity has exceeded our limits. Please try again later." WTH is up with that. Something new?
Well that would suck, I know they changed it so you had to have the grade as well months back but I haven't run into this yet.
NGC is doing some weird stuff with their cert lookup. A few months ago they started requiring you to enter the grade as well as cert number. Now this. Maybe this was part of that same update but I really would like to know a logical reason for this.
I got the same message right after they updated it. I just logged in and I could look up more numbers. I havent had an issue since. I think they might be limiting how many verfications you can do if youre a non member. Atleast that's what I determined.
Do you think they're trying to cut down on scam artists who are trolling the site trying to use some sort of computer generated submission system to determine which coins are out there but not photographed so they can duplicate and sell them?
I posed the question to NGC and this was their response......."Thank you for your question. We limit the number of searches to deter the automated and potentially malicious gathering of data."
Go me. I was intentionally trying to be dramatic for humor, but when I really thought about it, it made sense that this was a protection effort.
furham - Just keep in mind that you can always find current vales (according to most of the various price guides) on Heritage. And it's free. And Heritage also it set up that you can track all of your coins and their values automatically with a program run by them on their website. And that way you don't have to use your own spreadsheet or update anything. It does it all for you automatically.
Their logic is so stupid, if someone wants the data they can get it from countless sites and the coins are pictured anyway.
Is it really "so stupid"? Or is it maybe just annoying? It's a lot harder to mine their data when you can only pull so many a day/week/month.
In my opinion it would qualify as stupid. Clearly they're worried that someone will get their cert numbers, yet Heritage/eBay/every dealer website ect has 100s of thousands if not more of them available if someone wants to get cert numbers. The only thing they are really doing is making it harder for people to check their pictures vs a coin they bought or are interested in
And what about people with a legit need to be able to look up more than 12 coins? I own way more than 12 NGC graded coins and I'd be peeved getting stopped at 12 when I'm trying to make legit use of the look up. Or how about coin dealers, etc? Besides simply deleting the NGC specific cookie or just reloading a tab using a private browser session both defeat NGC's supposed data protection method. If someone really wants the data this flimsy attempt at stopping them isn't going to work. It's really just inconveniencing customers imo.
I think that's a reasonable question and on that should (and probably already has) be given to NGC to chew on.