Welcome to Coin Community.
We'll start with, it's priced at twice the market value for an uncleaned coin at my most generous grade.
Now. It's a very scarce date, but still available - note there are 82 of them on
ebay right now. I went through some of the seller's other coins (he has other 1888's, too) and there seem to be common threads among them. First, he can't get the excessive green out of his images. Second, my gut tells me that many of these are likely Katrina survivors from flooded homes of collectors (or other floods). They just have that cruddy, built-up look to them, and I can't list logical reasons, but we saw stuff like this in the aftermath of Katrina flood (groan) the market.
And I'd really like to know where that red patch came from. And where the fresh solder above the UN in UNITED came from. Needless to say, this is a definite "pass."
Now, to your specific question: No, you can't look at what we see here and say, "Yeah, this is a poster child for cleaning." I'm betting it's been cleaned, the abrupt end to some of the crud hints at that, but if it has my thought is, "just_what did this thing look like
before they cleaned it?"
It looked like a coin that spent months in flood sediment, that's what it looked like.
Posted 04/24/2015 8:25 pm
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