If this has already been debated here I apologize but I found it an interesting read and a tough question to answer. I have changed my mind three times.....
Taken From
Numismatic NewsThe scenario for this week's Coin Dealer Ethics question was originally published in
Numismatic News in mid-January. Ever since then, the scenario has been debated in the News' Letters to the Editor section virtually every week, with many weeks having several letters about this interesting situation. I thought that my readers might enjoy discussing it, too, since it seems to resonate with lots of people. You can read the entire original article about the overlooked 1893-S
Morgan dollar, but I'll distill the essential facts, as I see them, here.
In 2005, Dave Lembke bought a few small piles of
Morgan dollars from his local coin dealer for $7 to $9 each, a price that was just a little over the silver value of the coins at the time. He took the Morgans home and stashed them in his safe until he had time to check them for VAMs. (VAMs are popular
Morgan dollar die varieties.) On December 24, 2005, Dave had some time to look at the Morgans, and was amazed to discover that one of them was a rare and valuable 1893-S.
He took the coin to the dealer he bought it from for $7, asking the dealer how much he would pay for it. In Dave's account, he admits that he didn't want to tell the dealer that the coin had been sold by him for $7, because he didn't want to make the dealer "hang himself." The dealer offered $2,100 for the 1893-S Morgan if it was certified as being genuine.
Dave sent the coin in for grading, and it came back graded "VF Details Net F-15" (which means the coin had some surface damage that prevented it from attaining a full, unqualified VF grade, in this case a minor surface scratch and some edge dings.) The important news was that the rare 1893-S
Morgan dollar was genuine.
Although he held onto the coin for awhile, Dave eventually sold it to buy his wife a better car. He took it to a second coin dealer to get another offer, and the dealer agreed to pay Dave $3,150 for the coin, which Dave accepted.
The bottom line is that Dave turned a $7 investment into a $3,150 sale, primarily because the dealer who sold the coin had overlooked it when he sold it.
Numismatic News readers have brought up a number of points while discussing this little adventure. Some readers took Dave to task for not being honest with the first dealer. They thought he should have taken the coin back and admitted that it was in the batch, since no dealer in his right mind would have sold an 1893-S Morgan for $7. Other readers were more annoyed at Dave for not wanting to tell the dealer where he got the coin, considering this to be a form of lying. At least one person thought it was wrong to offer the coin for sale back to the same dealer he got it from under these circumstances.
Taking the other side of things, a couple of readers felt that Dave had done nothing wrong at all; the dealer should have known what he was selling. Some readers even thought the first dealer was a crook, offering more than $1,000 less than others would pay for the coin, so he deserved what he got by selling the $7 Morgan.
Interestingly, among the
Numismatic News readers who took the time to write a Letter to the Editor, most of them believed that Dave was in the wrong for one reason or another.
What do you think? Should Dave have fessed up and returned the coin? Or was it the dealer's loss for not checking his junk silver more carefully before selling it? [/font=Verdana]
Posted 04/21/2013 10:33 am
