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Message:: [QUOTE="mralexanderb, post: 471072, member: 7851"]It's basically a rip-off if you think you're getting a proof set that no one has looked at before. A few year back I won, at auction on ebay, a couple of "unopened" 1960s proof sets. They turned out to be nothing special. No $25,000 half $ or anything out of the ordinary, except the premium price for the original set. After learning about these sets here on CoinTalk I realized that I just paid a bit too much for what I wanted, in any case.  I believe these sets came in an open government envelope and were never sealed.  Now, I have heard that some of these sets may have been accidentally sealed while in storage by the natural humidity and time. A collector may have hoarded a large number of sets and the envelope flaps stuck together at some point in time. But that doesn't mean nobody ever looked at them. Just think, if you were a collector in 1960 and you bought 100's of sets of proofs, would you look at all of them? People hoard rolls and bags of coins without ever looking at them at the time of purchase.  I'm sure that somewhere down the line someone has bought a proof set that sealed itself sandwiched between two other proof sets that no one has laid eyes upon until newly opened. But I'll bet that that is a rare occurrence, and one you'll probably not find on ebay.[/QUOTE]