Misleading Ebay Ads

That is very misleading, check what they listed the composition of the coin as. If it says silver report it as a fraudulent listing

there are literally hundreds of these ads on ebay.

here is a search link..

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trk..._sacat=11116

I have written to the seller of those Buffalo bullion bars before, to no avail. Think about it for a minute... .999 fine German Silver? German silver is an alloy of copper and nickel which is a bit higher in copper than the gray cupronickel that we still use for the five cent piece. That stuff is 25% nickel, which is enough to completely overwhelm the reddish copper color. The lower nickel / extra copper in the german silver yellows it up a bit, making it a fairly close stand-in for slightly tarnished sterling. Nickel content of german silver ranges from 14% nickel to 18%.

So whatever alloy they're using... there is by definition no such thing as .999 fine german silver! Just as there is no .999 fine stainless steel or .999 fine brass. Those are all alloys!

The proper way to refer to the german silver alloy would be to say 82% Cu, 18% Ni... or in foundryman's shorthand it would simply be Cu18Ni

And those guys keep calling their copper .999 fine as well, which is highly unlikely. All commercially pure copper has about three tenths of a percent of oxygen in it. So an honest copper bullion dealer will specify his wares at .997 or 99.7% purity. I don't know of a commercial source for a higher grade since it doesn't matter as far as the electrical and working properties of the metal are concerned. Metallurgical researchers would be the only people to need a higher purity, and only they would be willing to undertake the difficult process to get that last little bit of dissolved oxygen out.

And then... there's the actual fake silver that's floating around. I've had two of those come through the shop so far. (I buy generic ugly silver to melt, roll out, punch into blanks, and make coins)

Both the suspect bars were hand poured, both had ".999 silver" stamped on them with letter stamps. Both turned out to be zinc! The first clue was the color... a little too gray, more like stainless steel color. Silver should be very WHITE, sometimes with black or gray tarnish, but the bare metal clearly white. Second they didn't SOUND right... too dull... no bright ring. Then they failed the diamagnetism test. (a strong magnet should slide s-l-o-w-l-y down a slanted silver bar) at that point I put them under a press to bash on them. Silver will of course bulge out and distort. Occasionally under a lot of tonnage there will be stress cracks at the edges if there's a lot of work-hardening, the metal in the crack will be bright and the broken surface very rough. But these things SHATTERED! And with a bright crystalline fracture! There was really no point in pursuing any further tests, as the metal was clearly not silver, but I went ahead and did the density test and confirmed that the metal was zinc... possibly a zinc alloy (pot metal)

I was able to get my money back in both situations, where clearly the seller had been hoodwinked and never had a clue the bar was not silver!

So know the tests and what the pieces you're looking at should look like, and feel like, and sound like. And I think that bullion dealers should be kept to honest standards about the wares they sell. I do a one troy ounce copper bullion piece, and specify my purity at .997

For what it's worth... I was the first to offer copper bullion pieces denominated in troy ounces... that was in 2006. Since then it seems like everybody's doing it! In my case it a kind of a joke, because copper was going up so fast it seemed like it was going to be the next "precious" metal!

I thank you tmaring for the interesting lesson.
Other then the 2010 coin sets I am looking for, I don't believe I will be buying any thing else..
I will simply continue to look through my change...

I will tell you that the same issues exist for stamps....
I have a couple of nice forgeries in my possession, that I have picked.. When you collect CSA stamps, as I do, there are tons of fakes and forgeries out there

Oxygen Free Copper is highly used in Car audio installments because it carries more current that the tinned versions of the same gauge wire does. More current means you can use a single wire from the battery to a larger amp instead of multiple wires to achieve the amount of current the amp needs (some installs have numerous batteries and alternators just for the audio system, so this could be allot of wire to hide). I used to install these and also used to compete in national levels for car audio and believe me OFC definitely makes a difference as a tinned wire would have to be almost double the side in diameter to carry as much current as its OFC brethren

Exactly! Perhaps this is misleading enough for ebay to pull these items?