Bit Of A Ramble

I guess this can happen to anyone and it might be a lesson to learn.

Just a while ago, I lost my job and it's only recently that I found a job that paid me pretty well. To celebrate the moment, I bought a few coins that I have been hunting for years. These coins rarely appear even in auction houses.
As you may imagine, they aren't cheap. All of them were bought online and I really never had much trouble buying coins online. Yes, I know you can start talking about the risks etc but we'll put that aside for now. There's no local coin dealer here and the nearest I have to go to is probably at least 2 hours of driving and 5 hours of flying. Not an option. I've been buying a fair amount for the past decade and it has never got to this point.

A couple of coins came out to be counterfeits as they had signs of pitting. Sent a rather unhappy email to the seller which he obliged to return my money as soon as he receives them. I sent them back by registered mail and the mail "conveniently" goes missing. This was a big eye opener for me. I'm still at the stage of writing a few "angry" emails as this is not acceptable.

Another one just arrived today and this wasn't really obvious until I weigh it. Underweight by 0.2 grams and I thought this was unusual. Picked two other coins from other years and turns out this coin was smaller by a good mm or so. Plus when I looked at the edge carefully, it was polished and it showed signs of a seam. Alas, it cannot be genuine.

I guess the moral of the story is that you always need to be at the top of the game. It's your money that you are spending so you want to make sure that you have the real deal. Thankfully all of them had easy tell signs of counterfeits unlike a couple of the super counterfeits that I have in my collection. I was actually surprised as both sellers had good feedbacks. Unless I happened to look for something too obscure or unlucky, there could be no telling how many others were stung in the same process.

In short - always check what you get.