Numismatik Lanz - Buyer Beware

This is a fascinating thread. As many of you know I am selling off some of my personal collection. I have a couple of guarantees that go along with the sales:

1. I guarantee authenticity. I am no expert, and I suspect some of my early purchases may have been fakes (hopefully not many). All I require from a buyer is that they suspect the coin. I will w/o question, refund the buyer to include shipping.

2. I guarantee the buyer to be pleased with the coin once in hand. I show images of the coins when they are for sale. Images can be deceiving. Once the buyer has the coin in hand, if they are not pleased with the coin, they can return it for a full refund minus the shipping.

I don't know, but it seems to me that any reputable dealer would at least provide a guarantee as in number 1 above. If not, imho they are not reputable.

Lanz should have just provided a full and complete refund to @Nemo w/o hesitation. If Lanz still believed the coin genuine, he could have had someone authenticate it for him and then re-list.

And regardless of the above, he had no authority to list and sell Nemo's coin. IMHO, he owes Nemo the remainder of the original price.

Lanz has lost any future business from this collector!

 

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The Tryphon was the one I knew about that got past me. It had an extensive pedigree, from prominent dealers, so I didn't look closely enough at it. That one I admit.

The rest are older fakes, all that I know about, that were done before I arrived here, and as I stated, when NGC was only putting one set of eyes on them. The Thurium you posted was even before David Vagi was here.

Keep looking though. We've done over 400,000 in the last 10 years. More than cross any dealers desk and if you get to 15 I will be surprised. I can get to 15 in almost any dealers sales in just 1 year with far fewer coins. And trust me if they are out there, there people here and elsewhere who just love to revel in our mistakes and they will get posted. It's funny, CNG withdraws a few coins out of most of there E-sales, and no one says anything. NGC slabs a fake 8 years ago and we never hear the end of it.

I don't really need to defend what we do. We have a better track record than anyone. You started attacking me and NGC first so I will defend myself.

For some reason you keep defending Lanz who basically stole someones coin.

Barry Murphy

 

My life is too short to get dragged too far into this thread. I keep my own list of dealers that I will and will not deal with. The reasons that they end up on the don't deal with list are varied and down to me. This list has now grown by 1.

 

Well that's spooky, I saw the "exact same" coin on eBay last October (https://www.ebay.com/itm/ancient-Roman-coin-/273497983375) and had searched numismatic auction results and found one which was identical (maybe the one you bought), assuming that it was one singular coin and for some reason the coin was being sold-off again. Here's an obverse pic I was able to salvage from the listing:


The thought that it was a fake didn't cross my mind, I thought it looked pretty legit and that whoever won it for EUR 348.89 got a good deal. Clearly I should stay away from such coins until I learn more and stick to obscure Greeks that no one really cares enough about to fake in quantity.

I wonder if Lanz actively collaborates with forgery workshops to salt his offerings with highly profitable garbage?

 

Pointing out a handful of fakes that slipped by out of tens of thousands of NGC submissions doesn't really tell us very much. Barry & David have never claimed to be infallible in detecting forgeries. No one is. Of course it's possible to find examples like those you cite. I've known them both for decades though and there is no one in whom I have more confidence.

I'd be more interested in seeing examples of the opposite sort of "mistake": coins that the current principals at NGC ancients have condemned that have eventually been conclusively shown to be genuine. I'm not aware of any cases like that, but of course I don't see everything. It's one thing to suggest that they occasionally are overcautious in declining to certify certain problem coins. That's a reasonable position to take. (I had a long discussion with David Vagi several years ago about a worn Lepidus aureus that he declined to certify, which I'm still convinced is genuine.) That's unfortunate but honestly, not that big a deal in my opinion. In their position I also would err on the side of caution. I think it would be much much worse if NGC is outright condemning genuine coins, but I don't think that's happening; certainly not often and probably not at all.

Phil Davis

 

I wish this quote could be remembered in Earnest by all of us, it would reduce conflict and long argumentative threads which will never be resolved in agreement. Thank you

Jim

 

This thread has become more about forgeries than the original question. Even experts (by whatever definition or criteria one might use) frequently disagree with one another. Its probably why NGC might be in a better position if they had a third member for situations where a majority opinion is needed.

As for Lanz. I find it so hard to understand why he would act in such a way. Honestly it is just bizarre, unethical and most likely illegal in most developed nations. It would seem that the risk of exposure with a resulting loss of clientele and income would be enough to discourage him from behaving in such a manner. Maybe he is desperate for cash? Maybe he simply does not care? Who knows.

For many years I have had reservations about him and his business practices. Such so that I have only bought a single coin from him 11 years ago (a common denarius I did not need or want but was bored one day). Unfortunately there are plenty of new customers for him out there who have no idea who he is or what he has been doing.

 

If Lanz does not offer a lifetime guarantee of authenticity, then for him the transaction is over when the coin is delivered. And if he says he does offer that, good luck getting him to stand behind it, unless you live nearby. What floors me is the highhanded way he treated the return as if it were a re-consignment. He sold the coin on your behalf, at a loss, and magnanimously "waived" the consignment fees. I would tell this story to eBay if that was the selling site and get them to put the screws on him. But make sure the communication was tight and clear so there was no chance of a "misunderstanding" real or imagined. This kind of thing they will attend to.

Lanz has enough business activity that I doubt he worries about getting a bad rep from a single overseas buyer. For the amount of money involved he knows no one is going to try to take it to an international court. So, what does he care.

 

Wow, very late to this thread. Learned a lot and don't have much to add. What I can say is that if the seller refuses to give a refund, including costs of shipping, then ebay almost always will take the buyer's side as long as the item can be shown to have been returned. In the one case where ebay didn't side with me (as a buyer on a non-coin item) I simply opened a dispute with my credit card and that was the end of it.

Ps. Always pay for your ebay purchases (via Paypal) with a credit card if you suspect even the remote possibility of needing a refund.

 

I've often heard that if eBay/PayPal won't credit you, and you dispute the charge with your credit card successfully, PayPal will immediately shut down your account. Is that not true?

 

Yes, definitely not true. At least not in my experience. They won't like it for sure (chargebacks always cost the merchant some money win or lose). If you have a problem that's why it's better to leave the card dispute as a last resort. However, that last resort pretty much always works ;- )

 

Did we ever get a metal analysis on this trite?

Ross G.

 

It strikes me that modern forgers would mostly do a better a better job than this.

So perhaps what we might have here are ancient imitatives from areas on the fringe of the Greek world - maybe the Black Sea litoral, or alternatively the Thrace/Macedonia region.

Ross G.

 

As for my experience with Lanz. I had an incident, where a coin did not arrive. He refused to refund my money claiming that I was trying to get the coin and the money. We had a little shouting competition on the phone (he is Austrian, I'm German). He blocked me as Email bidder, I never saw the coin or my money and that was the end of it. So I guess he doesn't mind losing customers.

 

@Tejas, Terrible. Just curious: did he provide a tracking number?

 

@Tejas , That's awful. There just is no excuse for that - no postal investigation?!