New Counterfeit Threat - Fake NGC Holders!

And this can be done very VERY cheap... leaving lots of room for profit.

Buck - That is an eye opener for me. It's even more amazing to me that you were able to figure out what they were doing. You must have a pretty good Loss Control section. Jack

Sel, you are forgetting the micro-o morgans

Check out the Gold Buffalo in the faux-NGC holder in this large lot of plated fakes. It seems like the seller has given up on offering counterfeits and was getting rid of his stock. Of course, the person who just bought everything for $99 may turn around and sell them individually...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/201461765817

Fake slabs are INCREDIBLY dangerous in our hobby nowadays given many collectors/accumulators/investors can't judge a coin worth crap and blindly trust the number on the TPG label.

No excuse for a counterfeiter to not be able to get the bar codes to match.

Now to get the online photo of the coin to match the fake slab that is the trick.


You watch, someday we will have a scandal where a counterfeiter hacks into NGC / PCGS and uploads their slab labels with the proper photos of the counterfeit coins.




If I were in the meeting on producing these slabs, this product would be made in America immediately.

There is little cost to these slabs in materials or manpower. Asia is cheaper on manpower but America is generally cheaper on materials. Cost isn't what should be driving this here either. We aren't selling slabs, we are selling guarantees. The slabs are definitely moving out the back door and causing a hit to our reputation. For an extra 3 - 10 cents a slab, it is a no brainer. Also destroy the tooling in China before leaving.





It was pretty simple. We were in a conference call, video conference. Sales VP was on talking about not being able to sell in certain markets unless we were at a price that was physically impossible for anyone to produce at.

I believe the exact line I used was, I don't care if someone has slaves to make his product and then just boot stomps them out of existence at the end of the day so he doesn't have to pay to house or feed them or for the bullet to kill him. This was below my manufacturing costs, and I could prove that we were the low cost producer. We were in growth mode and took sales, we weren't losing them to anyone.

Fraud was the only answer, from there it was pretty easy. Fraudsters don't make tooling, they see what tooling is around and unguarded and go from there. A crime of convenience.



FYI, I do care if they have slaves, I just don't care from a cost competitive standpoint. . . .

I too have experience in China with product going missing out the back door. When we figured out the scheme and reorganized things to prevent it from happening, some of my workers who had helped us stop it where beaten up by factory workers in on the scheme. In final attempts to continue the theft, they went to some EXTREMES in the middle of the night, including climbing over barbed wire fences in attempts to avoid surveillance cameras (something bribed security couldn't cover up they learned previously), to try to continue to access goods.

When it comes to the additional costs for additional security, my opinion is unless the TPG can pass this cost via price hikes, they are not too inclined unless absolutely forced to. Let's not underestimate the priority they place on profits. PCGS is owned by a publicly traded company whose share holders care about stock valuations more than anything else. WHile NGC is privately held, it's ultimately the same story. Evidence #1 are those handling fees per invoice. That is nothing more than a cash grab and is pure extra profit to them, kinda like Costo membership fees. If the cost of the additional security is another $0.10 and millions and millions of coins come out in a year, this cost is hundreds if not low millions. I have little confidence the stakeholders in these TPGs are going to approve that as a cost they have to eat. Rates would surely go up further.

As a follow up to my last post, I did a little research and confirmed that these two coins are in rather old NGC slabs. According to information I found here, these slabs are both "NGC7" style that was used from around 1997 through 2000. One notable distinguishing feature of these slabs is that the bar codes actually cover part of the NGC logo, whereas later versions had the bar codes positioned entirely below the logo. I'm wondering whether that might affect the ability of my app to scan them?