Do "Unsearched" Coin Lots Really Exist?

No doubt they exist. It's just figuring out which ones are genuine. 1% of the total, maybe?

In real life, you can find lots of unsearched hoards.

On the Internet, no.

We've had more than a couple hoards like that purchased by members and documented at Coin Community. The owners are elderly/passed and have just been hoarding coins throughout their lives. Truly unsearched and the CCF member was the first to handle them after the original hoarder. No doubt such things end up on ebay on occasion - look for the sellers who don't normally offer coins, or a new seller, and narrow down from there. You want to find the inheritor/owner selling.

The two LCSs that I frequent will sell off lots to wholesalers but they do go through to cherrypick high grade specimens and key/semi-key dates. Admittedly, they have let items that they'd rather have slip through, but the volumes exceed their capacity to search and the price that they have been willing to pay. The bulk coins might be considered to be...largely unsearched.

Personally, I think that there are scenarios that exist where coins are unsearched or sold off in bulk/cashed in at the bank. You probably need to be in the right place at the right time in order to get unpicked specimens.

I suspect that the vast majority of people who actually are trying to sell "unsearched" bulk coins are not dealers or anyone who knows correct coin terminology. They don't know that they're supposed to call them "unsearched", so searching ebay for that word isn't going to detect them. "Unsearched" isn't even a real word, at least as far as my spell-checker is concerned and constantly wants to remind me.

The topic has come up many times on the forum before, like here, for example.

Simply a small advertisement in the neighbourhood 'free' newspaper that circulates once per week...

The problem with this hypothesis is the "unsearched roll/lot scam artists" have hijacked the fact that there might be a few out there. Now nobody believes any of it.

Thanks SPP - reminded me of a neighbor I delivered papers to. I used to check every coin someone handed me when I did my weekly collections and she saw me studying the money she handed me. She got nervous thinking she shorted me; I told her not the case and that I was a coin collector checking out the years on the coins. The following week, she invited my brother and me into her home to go through a large hoard of pennies she and her husband tossed into a giant plastic wine bottle (sort of like the giant crayon piggy banks today). The coins were unsearched and akin to CRH, but they had been tossing into that bottle for a long while - TONS of LWCs and many great finds (I found my 1920 Canadian Cent that day). I suspect that's where we snagged the majority of the semi-key/key LWCs we used to fill our album. Right place, right time, good and trusting people.

So if you can find an untouched hoard that accumulated for decades by a non-collector, you might have the prize. Finding one on the internet - I'm suspect.