Effect On Pop Numbers From Resubmitting

Could you? I believe you have to know the certificate number to be able to see the image. So if you have a PCGS slabbed coin, how would you go about finding out if it had been previously submitted if you don't know the other serial number? Same question if you want to know if it used to be in someone else's slab? Now if you could call up all the pictures of a given issue you might be able to trace resubmissions and eliminate duplicates. But like I said I don't believe you can do anything like that.

I remember them doing this also and remember one person sending in a few hundred himself


In some cases where the coin is rare or shoots up thousands in the next grade up it may be higher than 50 or 60 percent if not more than this. Here is an example,lets say MS-65 says it has 2500 in its population and 5 in MS-66 and the price difference is $2000.00 between the two grades, there will be a high percentage of those MS-65's that are resubmissions

I am not sure computer pattern recognition would be able to do this well enough.

Your talking about a capability that PCGS has had since the late 80's when they introduced the Expert System. One of the advertised advantages was that it would create the digital fingerprint and be able to recognize a coin if it was resubmitted. Even after they dumped the computer grading portion of the program they could have retained the fingerprinting portion but they dumped it because it would have cut into their profits from resubmissions. When the Secure Plus program was introduced the fingerprinting feature was reintroduced. But it is only used on coins that are submitted for the more expensive Secure Plus service level. If a Secure plus coin is cracked out or one that was submitted but didn't make the cut is resubmitted at the cheaper service level it doesn't go through the fingerprint recognition so they can still keep at least some of the crackout resubmission market. As for creating fingerprints from previously imaged coins I would suspect those fingerprints would be much more questionable.

Interesting - I was thinking about that Conder, it would definitely cut into their revenues if they did something like that, so it all makes sense.

Thanks for the insight!

Yes, and it's also showing too many lower grades, like a 63 that now is in a 65 holder.

Pops will never be an accurate estimation, anyways. Even if a concerted effort was made to actually recover old slabs or current data, how many people hold slabbed coins as pure investments, and would never hear that some TPG wanted to know what they had?

How many dealers have a vested interest in the crackout process?

How many variety collectors want to suppress the true commonality of high-grade varieties they own? This is a known problem with VAMs.

When one nice, upper-end 64 could be responsible for 20-30 resubmissions between two or three dealers, you can assume that any coin with a decent jump in condition value at the next grade is woefully overcounted.