By Jack D. Young
As many readers may know, I have regularly used eBay (the Bay) to hunt for counterfeits to research, document and write articles on in an effort to help folks protect themselves from purchasing fakes. And the Bay has been a very fertile hunting ground. I could literally find seemingly 30+ listings a day with just quick browsing of my favorite categories there.
But there seems to be a significant change in the air with a couple of positive changes made for the apparent good of the hobby.
And Michael Bugeja of Proxiblog recently asked me, “Can you send a short article with your thoughts on how the eBay counterfeit policy is working?” So here goes!
Here is a podcasts I participated in on the topic!
And when the policy started, I decided to test it on several “obvious” counterfeits. I noted in both podcasts I considered myself a “crash dummy” (operative word dummy!) for the program:
Initially established for coins listed at $500.00 or more, talk is it will be reduced to as low as $250.00 as time goes on.
I actually purchased 5 different “coins” to see how the process would work, understanding eBay’s policy is no counterfeits, period.
So, a real range of counterfeits here: A “Red Book” raw counterfeit, 2 Henning nickels, one raw and one ICG holdered, a counterfeit Morgan$ in a fake TPG holder, and a raw rather recent and documented counterfeit Trade $. And what I learned from these? First, all 5 counterfeits failed the authentication guarantee review. It is noteworthy that both Henning nickels (contemporary counterfeits) failed as well, but they are counterfeits. The 1875-S Trade $ is also noteworthy in that NGC had written articles in 2011 and 2021 documenting these as counterfeits, but PCGS actually slabbed an example recently as genuine.
I posted the Trade $ on PCGS’ CU Forum and had a lively discussion until the moderator ended it…
For those who don’t know, PCGS is actually the contracted source for eBay’s authentication process. And they apparently learned from authenticating another example of 1875-S Trade to kick my purchase out. The previous certified example was stamped with very modern looking counterstamps and is shown in this TrueView image:
There are many well documented attribution marks between this example, the NGC documented example and my purchase. To my eye, the counterstamps alone were an issue here! And I noted in our podcast that maybe the “H” and “K” meant Hong Kong!
So my purchased example did not pass authentication, and this is the tracking notice shown for it:
Basically the same indication I saw on the other 4 purchases. One thing to note is I was immediately refunded my full purchase price upon the item failing at the authenticator.
And my final post on the CU Forum:
I guess the “host” didn’t want any responses to this!
And I guess the truth hurts, as I have recently been aware of an issue with a PCGS certified/ authenticated Lincoln cent rarity that is less than genuine and their “partial” (relative to the purchase price) buyback $’s.
So, at the beginning of this I alluded to a “couple of positive changes” eBay has made to combat counterfeits. The 2nd is their establishment of a “Network of Experts” empowered to report bad listings for removal. And I can report from experience that this has been noticeably effective and has had an impact on the number of counterfeits seen in the platform currently as well.
As I noted to my eBay contact:
Hopefully this trend will continue in the future.
Proxiblog thanks Jack for his diligence and is proud to share his work.
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