Quote:
Regarding your last question about APCGS being a coin dealer
slabbing there own work, this is entirely untrue. This has started
on a certain coin forum by someone.
The evidence chain:
- CCF member
investego registered here in November 2011 with the exact same APCGS staff e-mail address as appears in the e-mail quoted above by coinsaus. It was clearly the owner/operator of APCGS himself. When he was banned from the forum for spamming his products, he re-registered here under a new username and continued to spam. At least three times.
-
ebay member investego was a prominent seller of APCGS slabs. That particular
ebay ID has since become amalgamated or deleted so you can no longer find it by searching for it on
ebay, but back when the "APCGS is a basement slabber" allegations were first being made - that is, someone who sells their own coins - they were quite prominent, and pretty much the only seller of APCGS slabs on
ebay.
Now, has the owner/operator of APCGS stopped selling their own slabs now? Perhaps, perhaps not, and it's certainly commendable if they have indeed ceased and desisted from selling their own stuff and attempted to become truly "third party". But it's certainly true that they originally were a "basement slabber".
Now, for the links between APCGS and
The Gold & Coin Shop, a coin dealer.
- Both are in Port Macquarie. Port Macquarie is a pretty small town. There's only one coin dealer in town. No other coin dealers within a 200km radius. I find it rather odd that an attempt at creating a genuine
TPG would try to set up shop in a marketplace with only one nearby customer.
- Every single coin on the TG&CS website is slabbed by APCGS. All of them. He has embraced this "new
TPG" more thoroughly than most coin dealers in America embrace
any TPG - except, of course, for the basement slabbers. Many of the coins are still in the "MS graded" first-generation slabs - which does nothing to enhance our opinion of the knowledgeability of the proprietor of TG&CS, or the reputation of APCGS. APCGS is also advertised prominently on every single one of TG&CS's pages. One could easily be forgiven for thinking that the TG&CS website was just a front to try to attract business to the APCGS website.
Are they one and the same people? No. At least, the proprietors of the two businesses and the owners of the two websites are listed differently. Are they good mates? Clearly, yes. For a coin dealer to stake their entire reputation and their entire inventory on a startup
TPG is a big gamble, especially when not one single other brick-and-mortar coin dealer had any APCGS coins in stock, at all. I wouldn't do that for somebody I wasn't 100% sure about beforehand. I don't know whether Chris talked Shane into starting up a
TPG, or whether Shane talked Chris into becoming his main customer and front company. But there's clearly been collusion of some kind between them.
Can people change? Absolutely. As I said in another recent thread on this subject, I'm a softie and a little bit of penitence can go a long way with me. I'm also entirely aware that even the great and powerful PCGS started out as a cartel of coin dealers - what we would now call a "bunch of basement slabbers" - back in the late 1980s and they even made an
out-of-court settlement when charged with false advertising in 1990. They've come a long way since then. But so far, all I've seen from the proprietor of APCGS is arrogant denial of wrongdoing and ignorance punctuated with certainty.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 03/10/2014 12:24 am
