Are These Perforations Possible?

I ask because I know zero about US stamps of this era. To me the right side of the scan looks like an amateur craft project, but the stamp is already bid up to $350 ?? What are these bidders seeing that I'm not?



http://www.ebay.com/itm/nystamps-US...965362&rt=nc

I dislike for money is my guess!

Stamps is clearly reperfed....possible on 3 sides??

At bottom and right for sure.

Reperfed? More like nibbled on by a rodent.
Don

Edit; Stamp Smarter has numerous reviews with this seller. While they occasionally will update a listing they more often than not ignore our requests to improve their listings.
In my opinion buyers are foolish if they buy under their terms and conditions which clearly state, "Some stamps could be expertly restored, regum, or repaired." A lot of their 'repairs' are filled stamps which are shown with the smaller image of the stamp reverse. In our communication with the owner regarding the lack of calling out the faults he takes the position of "we post images and offer money back if not happy".

This seems to be acceptable to many in this forum (and on ebay) but at Stamp Smarter we feel the 'buyer beware' is not healthy for our hobby. Calling out obvious faults, alternations is done by any quality seller, we recommend avoiding those who play this game.

At $270 and again at $325 the bidders were people with 33,000 and 10,000 feedbacks. Presumably these are people who think they can resell this and make a profit??

With a catalogue value of 2250.00, $270 is 12% and $350 is 15%. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's about at the point where one could still make a profit on resale even if one openly acknowledged the faults?? Perhaps not much of a profit? THat would explain the high-feedback bidders. The others, the ones currently bidding, may not be aware that it's reperfed, but I'm assuming the 33,000 feedback bidder was aware, which is why he has dropped out??

In other words, a fault-free or minor faulty copy of this stamp with og would go for an awful lot more than $350.00 at a Siegel auction, would it not? So to some degree ebay is functioning as a place where people buy stamps at unrealistically low prices. Some know what they are doing, most do not. And the "most do not" pool are the ones getting cheated. Three cheers for Stamp Smarter, which could help the "most do not" group. But then there's the 33,000 feedbackers who know what they are doing and hoping to get a stamp like this at 15% in order to resell it at 25%? But where would they resell it? At a major auction house its reperfing and other faults would be obvious and it would sell for little more than 15%. Reselling it on ebay would bump up against the " ebay discount" ceiling, roughly the same 15% to 20%. Unless one "got lucky" and found an ebay buyer at 30%.

Or is this the wrong way to analyze this?

Would a sale at $300 or $350 be commensurate with knowledge of the reperfing, but much beyond $350 would not be? Which would be why the knowledgeable bidders dropped out at about 15%?

P.S. I did not check the cv of $2250.00 If it's not correct, my calculations would need to be revised.

Heir,
I think you are correct, we have a number of reviews where the same material from NY Stamps is being resold (some actually use the same image in their listing that NY stamps posted). Unfortunately the vast majority continue the trend of not describing the faults/alterations but rather simply rely upon 'buyer beware'. They almost 'have' to make their profit over what they originally paid. It's kind of sad to see this.
Don

For many years nystamps claimed "Lifetime member of APS" in all their listings, now I just noticed that they took that line out. I wonder what happened?

It's now up to $382 from a 10000 feedback bidder whose max has to be even higher. (He bid twice in a row at $382, which means he raised the initial max bid that got him past the current underbidder.)

So we have a 10,000 feedback bidder who is willing to pay close to 20% of cv. At that point it becomes hard to explain why, unless he plans to resell it as sound, either because he is unaware that it's reperfed or because he plans to be unforthcoming about that little problem when he resells.

They removed the APS membership references around the same time as I filed a complait against them with APS regarding some of their selling practices. The case, I am told, has now been decided, but since the result hasn't been published yet in the AP, I can not say what happened. Suffice it to say, I am not happy with the BVP decisions. Aside from my extensive documentation, a "supporting" letter was presented by an ex-fellow member of the Community Stamp Watch committee who (as all of us who served there) observed all of the reports received from members regarding some of their listings, so as far back as 2006 I clearly saw the lack of disclosure of faults by this seller who, by the way, as far as I can determine sells more stamp lots on ebay than any other seller. Many others list WAY more items (Langs has about 70,000 at any given time) but nystamps starts everything at 99c and sells virtually everything they list - which is usually a few thousand items per WEEK.

I agree with everything that Don has already said. But as long as ebay cares so little about accuracy and ethics in describing material on it's site, sellers like this will literally get away with murder in terms of selling stamps with undisclosed faults. I do not foresee a better future. This seller isn't alone. On Stamp Smarter we are only able (thanks to lack of volunteers willing to search listings and report problematic ones to us) to report a tiny fraction of the bad listings.

The biggest thing any of you who really "care" can do is help us by reviewing listings and when you find one that is misidentified or has undisclosed faults or any other negative aspect that would/could cause a buyer to be financially harmed, report it to Stamp Smarter. Reporting is easy (takes me like 1 minute) and Don reviews them all so even if you reported one that is found to be OK, he will simply remove it so no harm will come of it. Further, you may make reports using a fake name. You do not need to use your real name. Some do. (I do). But you can remain anonymous if you choose. Help make a difference.

The price is now up to $482. I know everyone here will probably disagree with me, but I blame the bidders and not the seller for this madness. The seller started the auction at one cent. The bidders are driving the price and if they are dumb enough to pay 20%+ of CV for this stamp, so be it. The reperf job is so bad that it will fool no one who is willing to spend this type of money for a stamp.

Part of what you are seeing here is a bidding war between two buyers who may not be evenly matched. On the presumption that the bidder with high feedback "knows" what this should sell for, the other bidder may be saying, If it's worth X to him then its got to be worth X+ to me.

Pure speculation on my part, of course, and probably not worth the price of admission.


That said, this stamp has a nice appearance. I'm not a bidder on this one but I have been looking for a bargain example of this stamp for about a year, and you don't get much for under $300 anywhere. I am not surprised that this is over $400 even if you allow for the reperfing. It is a key for a basic set of 1869s, and that gives it a boost in pricing. Whether or not the buyer will keep it at nearly $500 remains to be seen, but with nystamps he is not afraid to take a chance on looking at it, since they are generally pretty painless about returns.

The day of approvals is past, so for buying online nystamps has a policy on refunds that helps them with high turnaround. They are a high volume dealer with a different business model than the traditional dealer. APS membership or not, I don't see that changing.

This has been going on since 1840, in stamp shows, flea markets, local bourses and the like. Since I started typing this, thousands of fake paintings, fake gems, and used cars with hidden defects have been sold.

We wouldn't be mad at the ASDA or local stamp club if a seller at one of their events did the same. Easy to bash ebay - of course they deserve it on alot of fronts - but they should not be held to a higher standard because it is the internet.

The seller - who I wouldn't dream of buying from - is describing his item. Is he listing everything - good & bad - that he knows about it? Of course not. (Ever bought anything at an antique shop? Used car?) His picture, in this specific case, tells anyone as much as they could ever possibly want to know about the stamp.

The buyer - who was willing to pay $500 for a stamp (!) - is responsible here. If you can afford to spend that much money on a stamp, and you can't understand from that picture what you're getting (!) - well that person is solely responsible.

Is this good for the hobby? Doesn't sound like it. But at the same time, if we've got some rich guy - so eager to get that stamp that he/she is willing to spend $500 on a wildly altered copy - well that sounds to me like the value on stamps is on the rise & more bidders/more competition is out there. Are we happy with a 'new breed' of collector - for whom anything goes? As long as it looks 'good'?? Well for me, no more or worse than the folks willing to pay $500 for a 100 jumbo gem version of a $.50 3c comm from 1950.

ebay can't police this, and I'm not sure we would want them to. We can boycott the seller, but that's about it. Educating the collector/buyers is the only answer, but in this case, that ship has sailed...

Trouble is with some sellers, is goes beyond simple 'lies of omission' or marketing puffery. For example, the number of listings where the stamp is misidentified is astounding. You can apply the same arguments that you made for alterations, the buyer should educate themselves before making purchases.

But does this hold water when the listing calls out the wrong catalog number? Do we look at the sellers feedback, see he has sold 15,000 stamps and has a god rating, and not assume the guy knows what he is selling? How can sellers think of themselves as a good dealer when they can't even properly ID their own material? And funny how it is ALWAYS the higher priced value, very rarely have I seen a listing where the dealer had under-valued a misidentified stamp.

It is like you went to the local used car dealer and the guy stands there describing a Ford when in fact the car is a Chevy. I can understand that the seller/buyer relationship depends on the seller being educated. But there is a line somewhere between an educated buyer and a deceptive sale. On many stamps you have to assume the seller has watermarked the stamp and IDed it properly. You have to assume that the seller has not photochopped or "improved" the images to make a sale more likely.

This is why we should support sellers whom do not play 'buyer beware – but don't worry I will accept returns' game. There are plenty of great sellers who fully describe their material, Stamp Smarter has a list of recommended seller who do just this.
Don

"A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted" Perhaps the buyer thinks he can do a better re-perfing job after he buys it.

High volume sellers like this are buying collections and flipping what they can to the market as fast as they can. Wanna bet that they are relying on the numbers associated with a stamp in the albums they are buying? It's fast even if not 100% accurate, and that seems to be the bottom line for them.

But it is true that anyone buying from them needs to know more than they do in order to keep from getting burned. So they are not for everyone. What else is new? I don't see them as big frauds; I see them as ambitious; working as fast as they can to turn it over, turn it over. Churning.

Look at the large lots they sell. That's the stuff leftover after cherrypicking for individual lots. Flip it out, flip it.

Very aggressive, I agree, not neat. But as long as they keep the door open for returns, you can't really say they are dishonest. Just in a big d----- hurry. And they're not the only ones.

Anyway, that's how I read them. And yes, I do buy from them from time to time, when I'm not outbid (which is most of the time for them).

I agree with essayk. Sometimes the business pace that precludes accurate identification of each item works against these dealers (I have acquired several higher-valued 1851-57 one-cent Scott numbers that were inaccurately described as the commoner #9 or #24, including from the dealer in question here). For them I assume this is accepted as a cost of doing business their way.