What's The Riskiest Coin Related Decision You've Ever Made?

Hate to admit it but I bought a raw 1909s vdb on ebay.

Yep, it was counterfeit but I didn't figure it out until
it was much too late to do anything about it other than learn my lesson.

Exactly!

Not really. We all know the horror stories of ebay purchases. It's just that an Ike is a bit different than a 1933 Double Eagle, for example.




You can just add coins at Numista. I've done so a few times. And a few of my additions have been pending now for over a year. Plus that I believe Numista should be a tool to help, not 'the law' of numismatics: the tool isn't perfect in any sense, but very useful where applicable.




This. Just this. Combined with me buying gold coins nowadays... Plus that I once bought some rare coins in a Swedish online auction without actually having been able to see the coins and knowing the auction house wasn't specialized in coins. Turned out to be a perfect deal, as they were genuine and about half the 'regular' price.

I agree - a lot of my older coins aren't listed at Numista, and I myself had to add some (in two cases, my additions even actually succeeded, adding two more countries to my list - Bohemia and Judea).

It's just that they tend to require photos, and more often than not either my photos suck, my example sucks, or both. And the 20-odd auction and gallery sites they allow photos from almost never have what I'm looking for.

In this particular case, I just plain don't trust my smartphone camera to take a photo of a shiny NCLT crown that isn't just a big circle of glare and blur. I suppose I might as well try it without the photos, and hope that someone can add the pics later.

EDIT: just tested on another NCLT crown, and the pics were actually pretty decent! I guess it's because it was so huge, so I didn't have to hold the camera very close to the coin...

EDIT 2: it worked! Well, since the Grytviken crown had a bit more shiny fields (and more legend, for that matter) than the other one, it didn't work that well, but the resulting pictures were still decent enough that I probably could actually use them anyway.

That's why I prefer to sell on there haha, rather than buy that is.

There's far more risk selling on there than buying

My riskiest was when I was low on money and was close to the amount of money for paying my house bills, "borrowed" some to buy a "very nice bright and shiny,uncirculated" Indochina Piastre De Commerce. I later found out it was made of a tin core and triple plated with silver.Nothing I can do about it bought at a stall at an event fair.Only reason I fell for this one was the guy have other coins like some Franks/Peace/Mexican 5 pesos, mainly US coins that looked all genuine.

Thanks bro. It ended well. Very pleased with these.