Long Rant About An Ebay Buyer

I bought a lot of 50+ British Trade dollars earlier this year. Because these are out of my wheelhouse before buying I posted pictures of a couple here, weighed & measured them, & did specific gravity tests on a random sample. Since then I sent 8 to ANACS for grading & have sold 18 raw on ebay without issues. The collection these came from was mostly assembled in the 60's to 80's. Many were in manila envelopes from reputable dealers at the time & I was shown spiral bound notebooks from the original collector with purchase prices, dates etc. The collection also included several rare US & World coins that I had graded by ANACS. In short, I'm confident these are authentic.

About 2 weeks ago I had a buyer purchase 4 raw coins. As soon as they got them they told me they had serious doubts about authenticity, that they wanted me to authenticate them, & once I responded they were taking them to a local coin shop for evaluation. I replied with everything I said above & pointed out that the listings clearly show weights & measurements of each coin. I also encouraged them to take the coins to the LCS & offered a full refund upon return.

They then told me their questions concerned the mintmarks. Evidently they thought the mintmark on one looked more like an 8 than a B. They also said that the 1930 had to be fake because it didn't have a mintmark. It was at this point that I realized they didn't know as much as they thought they did or they would have known the 1830 was minted in London & didn't have a mintmark. Instead of asking them why they were buying raw coins without basic knowledge of the series I provided them with 3 links to reputable websites with information. I encouraged them to review the links, take the coins to their LCS, & again offered a full refund upon return of the coins.

Their next message said that they weren't comfortable with the coins. They then proceeded to tell me they "used 60x microscope to examine the rim/side edge pattern and found some silver debris around the grooving". They provided photos that showed the reeding & there was evidence of some type of microscopic debris. Otherwise the reeding looked fine with normal circulation marks. I'm not sure how/why they equate scunge in the reeding with an authenticity issue. I replied that if they weren't satisfied or comfortable to send the coins back for a full refund.

They finally agreed to return the coins. Although they paid for all the coins at the same time & I shipped them together ebay policy required them to open a return for each coin individually. That generated 4 separate labels. I offered to send a combined label & they refused. I offer free returns so I'll be paying for 4 return shipments instead of one. They also made a point of adding a message to each return questioning the authenticity & adding 60x photos of the reeding. I'm assuming they were trying to justify the return.