US Mint And NH Banknotes From Ralph Orton Estate Cat $23,500

It'll sure be interesting to see where
the hammer falls on this lot...

Current Bid : $1,825 with 17 hrs to go...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/US-Mint-and...121370560087

Note; I believe Superdeals is same person who lists under ogstamps, rushmore_bargins, and hmorgan56.

If they are not the same person (who is 'Based in United Kingdom' but ships from US locations) then the same material moves between them all. There are listings were the same material has bounces from each one. And note that when a seller is 'based in one country' but ships form another country you are really taking a huge risk if you end up having to resolve any disputes.
Don

Yes... quite aware...

Great scan......


Not

Scans are very nice...
scroll down into listing...
each is scanned individually w/back scans.

I do not understand your comment???

Don,

The stamps actually ship from the UK. The item locations are a complete lie. I have been told by a reliable source that one of the practices of the man behind all of these British Cartel ebay accounts is to buy existing ebay ID's with a history of positive feedback. This account looks to be completely built-up by the crook himself.

The 30 cent appears reperforated on 2 sides, and those PF certs are from the days when genuineness was all they said and condition was not usually discussed. So there might be hidden faults that a current cert would disclose.

Still some very stunning pieces, I love the strip of the 189's.

It has at least 3 hinged stamps, but it does look very nice.

Sinclair,
It was my understanding that he uses one of several online services such as USAmail1 (http://www.usamail1.com/business_solutions.php) which allows anyone to 'ship' from another location.

These agents do actually accept the parcel from the UK and re-mail it from a US location. This keeps the buyer thinking that the seller is in the US (note the seller tries to make it look like a US firm with his patriotic graphics) and hides his real UK address.

Yet if you have to return anything to him he quickly insists that you must return it to the UK. This is often a cost that the buyer was not aware of when making the purchase.

And as you say, many sellers can easily come into '100% feedback' accounts. It is virtually meaningless to count on a seller having a 100% feedback score as an indication that they are ok to buy from.

Some might say that much of this does not matter, that using eBay/PayPal still protects the buyer. I respectfully disagree. ebay USA and ebay UK are not the same group. You might think that they communicate and work well with each other but I my opinion they do not. Not only does ebay USA and ebay UK each have their own independent groups for investigating sellers but they also have different legal groups. And of course there are also now international laws and jurisdiction issues that have to be taken into account.

All of this adds a layer of complexity that effectively helps criminals exploit the ebay system. Also in my opinion ebay has turned a deaf ear on these issues. There feedback system is a joke and the removal of their oversights only serves to help shady sellers avoid detection.

It is easy to simply blow the issue off by saying 'buyer beware' but is this really what is best for you hobby? This might work for a person who is philatelic suave and experienced; but what about a new person entering the hobby? Is the theory that they have to get screwed once or twice and learn this expensive lesson as a type of 'dues' for entering philately?

While I agree with you, this is clearly not a "newbie" lot. These people create lots designed to catch the collector who has a few years experience and a catalog level knowledge with some money to spend. The type who thinks that because he has read the catalog he is smarter than everyone else out there. That is not to say that conning collectors of this type is OK or should be ignored, just that to a certain degree they are bringing it upon themselves. They never seem to remember "If it is too good to be true it probably isn't".

Well, 10 hours on from when the thread began, and with 7 hours left to go on the auction, the bid is still at $1,825 -- opps, just jumped to $2,900! Well, that doesn't really affect the question I wanted to ask. I know nothing about classic US stamps. I just peruse this section of SCF to try to learn something now and then. But let's say the auction ends with a sale price of $4-$5k. Is that a bad price for the lot? If the cat value is $23K, that comes out to around 20% of cat value. You could knock an awful lot off the cat value because "it is too good to be true" and still justify a price of $4-$5k for the lot.

I read lots of posts here about these supposed shady dealers, and I don't dispute that there may be some real issues here. But based on the bids so far, I'm not sure that those bidding deserve to be described as in the excerpt I've quoted.

It will be interesting, however, to see what happens in the final minutes of the auction.

Basil

20% is not automatically a good buy. For example that 154, since it is reperfed on two sides, there is no reason to assume any gum is original either. It might be, but the assumption has to be that it is not. A no gum 154 cats $2750, but reperfed on 2 sides makes it a 10% stamp. And that is assuming it really is unused, which is something that can be very difficult to know from a scan, especially for a black stamp. In fact I would be very concerned about the gum on most of these stamps. Or of a 211B without a cert. The 153 might be thin at the top and appears to have a crease, so again 20% is pushing the limits here, too. These are the kind of stamps that have to be looked at in person by someone knowledgeable, otherwise there is absolutely no reason to trust that they are what they are claimed to be, even assuming those that have obviously correct catalog numbers.

It could be that shill bidding has something to do this lots like these. When you see the same material 'sell' between what appears to be the same seller using different accounts you just about have to assume that this is what is really happening. Keep in mind that there are also other possible reasons for a seller to pump up their sales numbers (making their books look better to a potential investor, laundering cash, etc.) by 'selling' to themselves.

And I concur with revcollector, this is a higher dollar lot but there are a handful of newbies with money to spend. And some of the practices of the shady sellers includes playing in the higher dollar material markets by assembling some nice items but then salting a few bogus items (reperfs, regums, washed cancels, etc.) they can seduce even experienced collectors.

Point is that many folks look at things like 100% feedback, having a lot of other bids on a lot, and the eBay/PayPal 'warrantee', having a certs of a few of the items, and make the assumption that a seller is safe. This is exactly what the crooks count on.
Don

Re: Item location

I bought from him quite a while ago and the stamps were shipped from the UK. His practices may have changed since. I can think of one particular instance where the seller was pretending to be a guy named Odet Walsh and I believe a purchased item was purported to be in Canada and was actually shipped from Canada.

I have to go along with Basil about the value of the lot, but I do wonder about what happens if the deal goes south. The fact that the seller operates out of the UK should have no bearing on which part of ebay governs the "protection" of the lot. Since the item is claimed to be in the US and it is the US branch of ebay handling the sale, the channels for redress are governed by US ebay rules, right? And if the seller defaults or renegs somehow, ebay has the same leverage to dun his/her accounts as if the individuals were in the US (because of the claimed location). In the matter of returns, the seller states that they are to be CONTACTED within 14 days (presumably irrespective of shipping time). That is within ebay guidelines and ebay protection should still apply, so what's the problem?

As for bundling lots and shipping them to the US for redistribution, that sounds like an efficient way to handle things that have to go through customs or need insurance. As for handling returns within the US, it's a hassle but it sounds like they don't have an actual office in the US, just a delivery point with no one there to authorize a return. Does anyone here have an idea for how to get around that? [I dunno, maybe they could receive the returns at the distribution point and bundle them back to the UK? But that would protract the transaction and delay the return of funds I would think.]

Please do not suppose that my questions are a veiled attempt to defend this company. I have no particular interest in them. I have not done any business with this company, do not know them and have not yet been burned by them. But by the same token, if there are hidden places for hooks in a deal, I want to know about it, so I have to ask. What's crooked here?