PCGS Has Damaged My Coin

The part that gets me the most is they did not contact you/dealer the day they damaged your coin. There should have been a call to the dealer on that day. It would be like hitting a car and then running hoping you are not caught. The fact that you had to contact them is disturbing and unprofessional. You are lucky the pictures existed. I never request photos so I would be out of luck. I do over value my coins now when I send them in. Just sent another batch and I over graded each one by 1 or 2 grades.

Thanks for posting this story.

Theyre a business plain and simple. If they would pay any value you put down I would put down 250 million and send them pennies all day long hoping on the off chance that a freak accident like that happens.

As far as their only paying whats put down if you undervalue it again its all business. Undervaluing allows you to send coins in the lower tier. The higher tiers arent more expensive because theyre harder to grade, its to off set their liability in case of a mistake. For 32 dollars you can get a 3k coin assured. Thats a lot of 32 dollar coins you have to grade to offset one possible mistake, if you allow them to undervalue and send it in the 20 dollar level thats even more.

When you deal with 100s of thousands if not millions of coins a year a mistake will happen with some theyre humans and humans make mistakes. Weve all dropped a coin before, we didnt mean too but handle your coins enough and sooner or later you will drop one. The same applies to them.

If they make an exception for him they have to do it for everyone which again means all the liability gets put on them for the most minimal of cost. Theres not really a reason not to just value everything at the 300 dollar max for the cheapest tier and send it in that way if theyd pay whatever if something happened.

Businesses have to make money though and cover their liability. If they dont they dont exist anymore. No business runs to lose money. Had the dealer properly valued the coin he more than likely would have gotten fair compensation for it. The dealer didnt though and thats where the huge problem comes in since now youre out the money and coin.

To make matters worse it sounds like the dealer gave him the impression he was doing everything properly when he was really just trying to make as much as he could off the submission. To me the membership fee is a small price to pay to know I can trust the person submitting my coins which would be myself. Since the dealer is the one who created the compensation issue he really should buy the coin and then he can try and recover his money through the guarantee. If he doesn't I would sue him in small claims court or the AU equivalent and spread the word about him never giving him another penny of my money.

Basebal21 - I can't argue with your perspective. They are in business to make money, yes. So is the dealer. But to me there is a huge difference once a company demonstrates that they are in it ONLY for the money. PCGS had the opportunity to do the right thing, and they blew it.

How do I know what the value is? That's why I'm paying PCGS! Let's say I think a coin is MS60, so I value it at MS63 just to be safe. Then PCGS grades it at MS64 and damages it. I could be out thousands of dollars in actual value. How does a dealer in Australia know what a rare coin from India is worth? Is he supposed to research and grade it before he sends it to PCGS? I have a bunch of coins from Thailand collected by my father-in-law. I have no idea what they are, what a declared value would be, and neither would any dealer near me. Yes, the coins could get lost in the mail, so it's a gamble. But in this case PCGS knows they destroyed the coin's value, they know what is the right thing to do, and they choose otherwise.

KB lets not pretend like the dealer had no idea what he was doing. The OP clearly knows what he had and communicated it to the dealer. The dealer knew exactly what he was doing over charging for the service then under valuing the coin, he was getting the op to pay for a couple of his coins in the lot.

Like I said PCGS is following their policies. If they make an exception for this case then theres no reason for any to ever follow their policy since theyll just pay whatever anyway. The dealer tried to skirt their system to lower his fees and a freak accident happened. Normally we would call that karma, unfortunately in this instance an honest 3rd party (the op) was affected. People try and scam their system all the time sending in doctored coins ect just getting a complaint is very common for businesses that side so I'm not shocked in the least bit they arent bending over backwards since all theyve heard is a complaint and seen a submission form that was designed to skirt fees.

Whenever I'm critical of a business I always ask myself why do these policies exist. In this case theres very valid logical reasons, thats not always the case and sometimes your head starts to hurt figuring out how someone came up with that rule. Now if PCGS just arbitrarily changed their policy I would completely agree, but theyre doing things by their policy just like every other big business on the planet does. The freak accident happened, but the straw that broke the camels back is the submission form which prevented being properly compensated from it.

I wouldnt hesitate to send them a sentimental cant be replaced coin and I have done it in the past, I wouldnt ever do it through a dealer though unless I knew them for years because of things like this. Usually when people dont know what they have theyd think they have the 64 and it would turn out to be a 60 but most people seem to add some padding to their insurance prices for effort ect to replace them if the mail loses them. That gives the room for pcgs too.

I dont understand how the dealer is getting a free pass. PCGS is following exactly what their policy says. It was the dealer who was deceptive.

The OP can rant and rave all he wants about what has happened but the bottom line is he will have to resolve this with the dealer that undervalued the coin on the submission form. I'd go see the dealer on Monday morning and discuss it with him and see what he wants to do. Any dealer worth his word will promptly pay you for your loss. If the dealer doesn't make it right, or tells you your complaint should be against PCGS, then you need to go see a lawyer.

I put both the owner and dealer because one of them should have been contacted. When the dealer was asked about the damage he knew nothing so I assume he was not contacted. If he was then there are two companies without ethics.

I still go back to the fact that PCGS knows they damaged a coin and never said anything. I'm not referring to the dollar amount being offered. The day they destroyed the coin an offer and apology should have been made. That is what an honest company would have done.

I keep reading how they are a business. I agree and businesses with ethics are always better off in the end. I have to believe they carry liability insurance for cases like these.

They haven't just heard a complaint, they returned a coin to him KNOWING they damaged it. The only way that comment makes sense is if you believe they damaged the coin and never knew it. I think that is not likely. The person that damaged it had to have known it. When the coin went through the supposedly multiple quality control checks, are we to believe none of the highly trained experts whose job it is to notice small details (and this is no small detail) just flat missed it?

As far as I'm concerned, I'm glad the OP posted this issue here. I think we all have learned a little.

I guess you could but it would leave people being unhappy. The cheaper teirs would be the ones eliminated. The 32 dollar fee goes up to 3k but theirs a teir for 100k+ coins thats 250 + 1% of the value.

Part of the reason for the separation too is submission speed. People like choices plus with those 100k coins you wouldnt want them sitting in the back for a month. Theres a reason why they get those done in 2-5 days to get it in and out, the longer it sits the greater a chance of a freak accident or something worse.




Theres a greater chance they didnt know than they did. That picture showing it is magnified significantly. Someone just checking label to coin in a few seconds doing 100s of slabs a day could easily just see that as toning out of the corner of their eye.

They arent paying an expert 6 figures to sit in the shipping room and things with the wrong label do get out. Theyll fix free it if you send it back but stuff happens. I had an internally cracked slab come to me, I dont believe they tried to just pass it off since they fixed it for free which costs them more with shipping then walking it to the other room and redoing it would have. They dont even fight you about it in my experience as long as they get it back to verify you arent just making up a story.

I can think of 10+ ways that coin ended up back at the dealer and not one of them is they knew it and just hoped no one would notice.

My point is were assuming A LOT here with very little information. The dealer has shown they arent someone whose word can be trusted and the op said they didnt even care. For all we know they told him and he said hed look at it when he got it.

In all honesty in this case it actually works out better they didnt notice and send him a 15 dollar check. Theres a chance someone saw it figured no owner of the coin would insure it for 15 and it must of been a 3rd party submission so they sent it. Or more than likely it just looked like toning or wasnt noticed since they arent going over them with magnification at that point and its just a quick glance over for major mistakes.

It just seems theres some quick assumptions to just paint pcgs in the worst light possibly yet were ignoring the fact that their point of contact is someone that showed they cant be trusted and cant be relied upon. It just doesn't make sense for a multi-million dollar business to risk a reputation over a few 100 dollars when they paid out over half a million on warranty guarantee claims over the last year. If they really were out to just stick it to people they wouldnt have paid that money out and just said no youre wrong thats properly graded.