Oceania Coins In Bulk World Lots?

Sounds like a scam to me. Do the pictures of the bags show lots of silver coloured coins and you are getting 99% bronze - then thats a scam.

Why would you buy bulkbags of common low value coins, that arehard to get rid of?

By far and away, the scarcest Oceania coins to find are those of Kiribati,
followed by Tuvalu, Cook Islands, Solomon Islands and Tonga.
Easier to find are the coins of PNG, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia (most common).

The content of a bulk bag varies depending on the time and place it was collected, and of course on how many people have gone through the bag before you, and what those people might have been searching for.

This old thread from 2009 contains my analysis of the contents of one 10 kilogram "Bundesbank bag" - which was apparently thoroughly searched through by at least one dealer here in Australia, given the near-complete lack of Australian coins within it.

Note: "Bundesbank bags" were bags of world and pre-euro-non-German-European coins that had gone through the German banking system; usually sold to collectors and world coin wholesalers. I don't know if the Bundesbank still does this practice, but at the time it was a major source of bulk world coins. As I recall, my bag had Bundesbank logos all over the plastic, but had equally obviously been opened and re-sealed.

I did find a disproportionately large number of PNG coins, mostly 20 toeas; I don't know if those coins were from the "German" or "Australian" sources. None of the other Oceania countries were represented enough to be able to say statistically if there was any skew towards low denominations. The American coins in the bag certainly were, with 665 Lincolns and just one non-Lincoln in the whole bag. I likewise found only Canadian 1 cent coins from that country.

There was only one silver coin, but that's to be expected.

@Sap, your old thread makes interesting reading.

Yes Philippines 1 piso coins were very much over-represented in the bags I went through too.

With the amount of PNG coins in these bags it makes you wonder if there are any still circulating in PNG.

I see you only paid $100 for your bag back in 2009. They seem to go for $150-$175 these days on ebay.

Every now and then the desperate need to do some noodling makes me think about getting another bag but I won't be getting any more any time soon unless the price drops to $120 or less.

I suspect you are talking about the same 10kg bags I regularly purchase from a dealer on ebay. I am pretty certain I know where the coins come from and yes, they have been searched, but not in the way you think.

This is my theory and I would love any input on it.

UNICEF has a coin return program to raise funds. I know they get all the foreign coins from CBA and I suspect they also get all the coins from airports and probably all the major banks. This is in effect loose change from travelers going through the airports. This explains all the coins from Indonesia, Thailand, China, PNG, UK, Philippines etc. UNICEF searches the coins for any high value current circulating coins which are sent back to the country for funds (not worth sending back low value coins). This explains why you rarely, if ever, find USA dollars and similar high value coins as well Australian and Kiwi money. Once the high value coins are removed the coins are sold off in bulk to dealers who throw in some of their scrap coins (old pennies etc) and package them into lots for ebay. I have had this theory for some time. The dealer only had a few batches left last time I bought some. I asked when he would get some more and he said not until the airports opened for travel again which supported my theory.

I have built up my world collection to a large extent from these coins and still buy them for upgrades and those elusive dates. I get the odd silver but you certainly wouldn't recoup the cost in silver finds. At the end of the day I resell the sorted coins and break even so not complaining. I also sometimes select coins for OS trades as Oceania coins are less common in Europe.

Last time I bought a large world coin lot was properly 10 years ago on ebay, many duplicates with minimum values. Silver? Unless seller stated there's silver, basically you can forget about it.

Gold coin O.o like actual gold or gold coloured