1869 $10 Gold Liberty

LOL an easy way to make an easy living. Maybe the seller's way of making a profit due to the excessive PayPal/EBay Final Value fee charges. I wonder if this kind of shenanigans is rampant on ebay; I have been buying a lot of hundred dollar coins lately

1) There are over half a million US coins currently listed on ebay. I kinda doubt they have the manpower - nor does CCW - to proactively vet every listing. For everything we find and report, hundreds go unnoticed.

2) Never lose your sense of wonder at the level of stupidity people are capable of demonstrating. Doesn't matter how bad it gets; it'll always get worse.

very good detective work, Watson. I have come across this seller before, who does auction a lot of higher profile coins. Now, excuse me I must check heritage for some NCS coins :) later

After futher investigation, I found this crack-out coin also sold in 2006 at another Heritage auction:
http://coins.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleN...0&lotNo=3087
What's interesting is the Heritage description, "The devices exhibit only slight wear, but the reverse field is smoothed, and the obverse is whizzed." I can't imagine any circumstance where a PNG coin dealer could miss all that.

its evident that its the same coin and someone cracked it out. I am not sure it was the seller on ebay that did the cracking since it was almost 2 years ago that it sold on Heritage and allot can happen in that time to a coin. If this dealer has any other coins that can be proven to have been cracked out for sale then it would start to get suspicious to me. We have seen coins listed a couple weeks after they were auctioned off and in those cases we are pretty confident the buyer at Heritage is he seller on ebay and all they did was crack the coin out and list it as problem free. This stuff does happen and we even had a member here (he was a new member but started before this situation came up) that got caught up in their lies about cracking out coins like this and doing the exact same thing. It takes allot of time to sit here and match up coins that have sold at auction in problem slabs because I am sure its way less than 1% of all the coins on ebay that this is happening with. Unless you just see something that makes you suspicious about the coin there is no real need to even start to investigate because chances are it will be a waist of time. We do report every one we happen to find though and that is about all we can do. Have you emailed the seller to see what he said about the coin in question? I have never dealt with this seller but I am guessing since he is a P.N.G. Member he will want to know about it because things like this can tarnish his reputation. Especially when they find he can't detect these types of problems on high dollar coins

The seller claims he has no knowledge of this coin having been cracked-out of it's holder. However, since the seller claims to be a PNG member, there is no excuse for him to claim the coin has no problems. As a PNG member, he should be able to easily see that this coin has numerous problems....whizzing, repairs, cleaning etc. Either PNG has no standards or their standards are a joke.

I'd also agree here; I wouldn't sell a $3000+ coin without scrutinizing it to the maximum and making sure its authentic no matter what my first impression of it was (and if this coin literally is garbage, it should have been pretty obvious but I wouldnt know since I didnt look at it on Heritage). At best this is a really careless move but I'm pretty suspicious because I've seen a lot of dealers do this. It's really, really easy money in a bad economy. And its sneaky, hard for buyers to find out (I'd bet only 10% of major sellers who do this are even figured out at all), and not against the rules, technically even though its totally immoral. There's one thing finding a coin with a total nonsense slab grade and not mentioning the BS grade, but there's another thing knowing a coin has problems or being completely careless about it. For instance, I think NGC's grading is a complete joke and they put MS-65 coins in AU whizzed slabs, but this was happening even before they went on the toilet. You'd see guys photographing coins that were blatantly cleaned according to Heritage photographs in a way to hide the cleaning. Worst case scenario is that 20% of the time, the guy returns it. Then they just relist after begging for positive feedback which the buyer is usually willing to give. They may lose $20 on shipping to pay the buyer shipping cost and keep a fake 'top rated' ranking but they often stand to make $500-$2000 per coin.