What a thrill the last InAsta auction was! I had already won some, to quote Howard Carter, "Wonderful things" (to be shared in the coming weeks). And I wasn't paying a ton of attention as I was watching some of the group lots. And then it happened! I looked up at my screen to see a, long sought after, man faced bull, in pretty rough shape, and a Valerian going for 2 Euros without any bids!!! I quickly threw my hat in the ring, surprised that this wasn't on my watch list. Probably had just assumed the thing would go for more than what it was worth to me. Once I hurriedly put my bid in, I started looking at the Valerian, thinking, "this guy sure looks soapy" (or some refer to it as mushy). Quickly my eyes dart down to the description to see, "LOTTI - Falsi (da studio, moderni, ecc.) Napoli nomos e Valeriano I antoniniano MB÷BB". Now, I don't speak Italian. But I realized pretty quickly that I had made a bonehead mistake, fortunately an inexpensive boneheaded mistake, and bid on and won 2 modern forgeries for 3 euros. It's a trend that I have been seeing in auctions lately. I really wish they wouldn't peddle these things at all. I would rather have a space in my collection than to fill a spot with these. Off to, what someone around here refers to as their "Black Cabinet", or my page of shame/phonies (fortunately it isn't a full page). Since I already had won several excellent (to me) coins I didn't feel so bad, but thought I would share so my CT pals could learn from my mistakes. Takeaways and things I already knew but ignored: 1-Don't bid on anything you haven't scouted ahead of time B-If it seems to good to be true, it IS! 3-Don't be a rube And D-Here are what a couple of fakes look like. The Valerian is just so obvious, I really am embarrassed to share this here, but if it will help teach then I'll show the . So please, post any hard earned lessons, fakes, forgeries or anything that you may want to commiserate about!
I have one question. Did you get 3 Euros worth of education out of this? We all would be better off if we could limit our errors to things we did not already know. There are so very many mistakes available in life that we really don't need to keep repeating the same ones. Yes, we do read Italian well enough for this case. It might be good for someone to throw together a list of words in common languages. I have no plans to learn any languages I do not now know but I would feel better if I knew fake, tooled etc. in a dozen languages.
I wouldn't be too hard on yourself. If these were in a group lot it would be easy to miss them. As Doug points out, you definitely got 3 Euro worth of experience.
3 euros was a good deal! Did I get 650 euros of experience from this one? Thankfully I got a full refund. Looking back on it, I clearly should've been more suspicious. Wishful thinking can be a powerful thing...
3 euros? No big deal man, heck I might have purchased them for that much anyway. Here's a fake I picked up in a small mixed lot of coins. If I would have known it was a fake, I probably would have paid the same price for the lot anyway. This one was listed at forum but I missed it, I think it was labeled as Maximian. Here's a fake I picked up intentionally at a coin show, it was 1 dollar...so I went for it.
Three euros is a cheap education - and thank you for sharing your experiences. Although I don't do "real" auctions (just eBay, where fakes abound), I agree that real numismatic auction houses shouldn't be peddling this kind of stuff. They can't be making much money on it, and it does carry the risk of confusing bidders who think they are in a safe place with genuine coins. I paid $25 or so for this - it looks kind of real until I noticed it weighs 4 grams and then, after the auction, I checked the Forgery Network: I would've rather paid 3 euros for my beginner's class in forgery detection.
