8 Reales Potosi Ebay

to the Community, doges!

Thank you jbuck

This is my Potosi 8 Reales cob, I purchased it raw from ebay several months back. The pillars and waves type are my favorite.

I noticed the item has been taken down on ebay.
Nothing short of amazing.

paulCT Unfortunately ebay is constrained by their current in-house legal opinions so that any form of policing based on the use of in-house experts (paid or unpaid) to authenticate coins is now prohibited. There was a seven year long period ending in 2013 when a panel of experts was in place and the panel (called the Coin Watch Committee) judged the authenticity of coins by written vote. We also acted pro-actively by reporting fraudulent auctions in batches. Threats of law suits by dealers in Spain and China pushed ebay to eliminate the panel suddenly and without warning.

These experts were selected by ebay and the positions were filled by invitation only based on reputation. No one was paid. It was strictly volunteer to try to avoid ebay being viewed legally as an "Auctioneer". In a situation with an auctioneer, the buyer in some jurisdictions is protected from buying fraudulent items because of the implied expertise of the auctioneer. Having an on-call panel of experts was viewed by ebay legal as opening an avenue for lawsuits.

The principle ebay wanted to use was a "venue" as a way of avoiding law suits. The concept of venue means that ebay is renting virtual space to vendors (like a flea market in an old shopping center). The vendor is the only party that can be sued for fraud. The legal department saw the on call expert panel as too close to staff experts to avoid law suits.

So while I agree that "police" are needed it will not happen anytime soon. In 2012 the Panel terminated over 500,000 auctions with lost fees to ebay exceeding $1,000,000. We also permanently terminated thousands of accounts. Those levels of termination are never reached today and permanent terminations of sellers NEVER HAPPENS. In addition, the panel estimated that at the start of 2013 the numbers of forgeries on ebay had been reduced to a level under 3 % of all auctions. Today the same estimate yields forgery levels 3X as high or higher. Most are not stopped before the auction ends.

The purveyors of forgeries are winning as we all know.

paulCT You can look at the situation as bad or you can view it as a learning experience. It sounds like you have gotten your money back so no real harm was done to you. When you get a fake always document the problems take very large photos so you can study the coin and learn from it.

The people I feel sorry for are the ones that choose not to try to get a refund. When I was working for ebay a surprising number of the follow-up contacts I made with people who won fakes (coins not reported or missed by the 7 person committee) admitted thay kept the coins. There were a couple reasons: 1) To learn about the fakes, 2) They waited too long to contact ebay about a fake or 3) they were ashamed to admit they were fooled.

As I said before, the ebay fraud rate was never below 3%, but that is a lot better than today. I can of course only speak for my section - World Coins. There were 6 US experts and myself. There were too many auctions daily for me to review each in detail so I used the approach of screening for the most common fakes/frauds. So I never bothered with Canada, Cuba, England or other countries where Numismatic Forgeries are very seldom seen. I always screened Spain, Mexico and Russia because the rates there were astronomical at times.

We also were required to do a written analysis to accompany our vote when an ebay user sent in a "Report". I ended up with a file of over 4,000 such reports in one year. So unless you spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week reviewing you miss some.

paulCT I agree with you. We can not expect ebay to do our job as collectors. We need to learn about what we collect before buying. We need to exercise due diligence and not expect to be protected.

That is why I write for this forum.

One of my favorite quotes is "Buy the book before the coin."