what was your worst coin buy?

not a coin, a society of medallists medal, creation by DeFrancisi (the designer of the peace dollar). I paid three or four times its book value, an example of money burning a hole in my pocket. I plan to take it to the ana worlds fair of money in chicago and see if I can recoup anything for it. Hopefully the same dealerI bought it from will be there and make a fair offer for it.

 

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Yeah I had a bad buy a few years back. I bought a Seated Liberty Quarter for around $35 off of ebay. After a couple of months of owning it I posted a pic on this forum CT and I was told it was a fake, I was totally flabbergasted. I contacted the seller and I told him it was a fake and I bought it a few months ago etc. He refunded my money and I learned a lesson. You see up until that point I was buying so many coins and tokens off of ebay that I hardly ever looked at anything. Now when I buy, I pull out the Bosch & Lomb 5x minimum magnifying glass and I look the coin over especially if it's a coin series I don't know anything about.

 

yea, I thought so. Live and learn.

 

That would be a 63/65 1946D walker I bought around 1983 for $280. I still hadn't figured out that the 1979-80 raging bull was dead. I sent it to PCGS when they got started and it came back as 64. I still have it in a rattler slab. Last time I checked I think it was worth $48. It's my Mongo candygram.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ciVBQixpU

 

Yes, indeed. This is the one. It is such a nice coin and was a must have!

 

Mine was an 1898 Barber Quarter, in an old-style PCI green label PR-64 slab. When I got the coin, I convinced myself that the scratches I saw were on the holder and not on the coin itself. I was wrong, which made the purchase a $500 mistake.

 

My mistake, like some others on this thread, was an impulse buy on Ebay. I was looking at US coins with the grouping of "ending soonest." As I was scrolling through,
I noticed one auction that had a mixed lot of coins, with a below average picture (about twenty coins randomly spread around), and less that 2 minutes left. (Insert Jaws warning music here.) The title was pretty generic, something like "silver coins," and there was no description to speak of. So I'm thinking that must have stumbled upon a lot of junk silver that nobody else has noticed and I better hurry and throw in a bid. After having to resign in to ebay, there was about 12 seconds remaining to throw in a bid...which I did. *Sigh*
It was only later that I noticed that three of the "silver" coins were not silver at all (1965 dime, 1966 Quarter, 1941 nickel), and the crappy pictures were not detailed enough to make out dates.
(I just assumed that it was ALL junk silver.)
Anyway, I made a lot of dumb errors on that purchase. But it was also a good lesson and a series of mistakes that I have not duplicated.

 

Dumbest....I bought the state quarter set autoship from Mike Mesak and Allen Krantz....no red oak presentation box though.....could have been worse monetarily!

 

my worst buy is too painful to even post. I'm out a good bit of $$. and like others here I really knew better.

 

My worst ever purchase were some Gold Pandas back in the 80s. Since they are so easily and expertly counterfeited, the resale on them was brutal. I'd never again get Chinese coins for that reason.

 

Back in 80s, i don't remember there that many counterfeits in late 90s when i bought them, my Panda collection which i sold off was one of the best moves i ever made.

 

Not as many as now for sure. I sold the Panda 1 ounce coins LAST year, so I laughed all the way to the bank. They were hard sells, in comparison to AGE coins, or Canadian Gold.

 

As embarrassing as it is to admit, when I first started buying coins @ eBay, I was sold a counterfeit 1878-CC trade dollar. Anyone want to venture a guess from what country the coin shipped from? lol. To add insult to injury, the "Seller" managed to convince PayPal that he/she never received the returned coin so I was deprived of a refund. Haven't since and never will buy anything from China. ​ grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!

 

My worst buy, I was maybe 6 months to a year into my interest in coin collecting. Went to a live auction that had a bunch of Morgans for sale in several 2 coin lots, with two different dates and mint marks in each lot. I bought several lots, and in the end, realized they really only had four different date/mint mark variations. Which I didn't catch because the coin lots were split up throughout the whole auction that included all kinds of other antiques. I would have been happier with different dates/mint marks for each coin, and would have only purchased one of each, had I realized. But I still like the coins, and don't regret it TOO much. I learned an important lesson, anyway. Pay more attention to the details!

 

When I first really got into collecting not too long ago, I bought an 1893p Morgan dollar at a flea market for I think $25. And I don't have to tell you the if the coin was authentic or not. :bangg:

 

[video=youtube;0lSjvbhZn7Q]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lSjvbhZn7Q[/video]

Poor Quality There's a lot of scratches obeverse & reverse what I did in this roll Just use as a Tips. Then 2 rolls of half dollar uncirculated become circulated!:hail:

 

This isn't my worst buy, but a story about my father-in-law who sparked my interest in coin collecting. We were at a swap-meet (I'm sure many bad stories start with that line). After visiting the lady that he liked to buy old "junk" Morgan's from mainly for their bullion value, his coin collecting is primarily for bullion value, we were walking down the aisle and came across someone with a bunch of silver dollars for sale. It was one of those garage sale type spaces, where it looked like someone was just clearing out a bunch of their old junk. He had trade dollars & CC Morgans which my father-in-law got all excited about. He bought 10-15 of these coins at $4 a piece, saying that was a great deal and these coins were pretty rare. When we got home, he asked me to look them up on the computer, which he didn't use, to see if I could find out what these particular coins were worth. At first, I got pretty excited because the first couple coins I looked up were very rare and worth a lot of money. Then I started to run into a few that didn't look like there was any record of being minted in the years that I had. For a split second, I though "Wow, these must be REALLY rare!" But then I thought better of that, and thought they might be fake. So I started looking up info on fake coins, and found that they were all Chinese forgeries. That was very disappointing. This was right before I got interested in coins, otherwise I would have warned him away from this buy. Actually, doing the research on these fakes played a part in getting me interested. And thankfully he was only out $4 a piece on them. It could have been a lot worse, and at least now he has examples of fake coins to compare with. I hope he kept them and didn't just toss them in the trash!

 

I bought two rolls of "unsearched" rolls with an Indian head penny on the end. Basically got two 1907 IH's and a bunch of 40's and 50's wheats. Can't remember exactly what I paid for each roll, but I learned my lesson. Every roll on ebay is searched.

 

I also got hit with this one about 10 years ago, luckily only paid about $20 but that should have told me there was something wrong.

Another purchase, about that same time period, was $100 purchase for 2 uncirculated peace dollars that were cleaned & polished.

Much earlier I bought up proof sets like crazy, now most are worthless. Luckily the pre 1965 sets make up for the later years.

More recent, I bought a good number of the 1999 silver proof sets from the mint, good investment, but continued buying them from 100 up to 220 over the next couple years. Now they sell for about $100 so those later purchases were the bad.

 

I'll go with the $90 that I spent on an 18541/2 California Gold Token (Bear on Back). I spent $90 on this fake gold token. I don't usually buy gold but got caught up in the auction spirit.