The Beautiful Classics Being Offered On Ebay

ebay is full, unfortunately, of counterfeit coins from China.
With the money involved in stamps, it's seems like another
cash cow for them on ebay, if it hasn't already started.

With the coins, you can often trace the coins, using the
completed listing search, from someone in Asia, to a general
subject collector in the US, and then often to a coin specific
dealer. The price and excitement around the auction going up
each time, because the coin gains credibility as it gets more
established in the hands of US based eBayers. Make sense?

It's much harder to trace counterfeits though.
ebay has taken away alot of info that allowed such
searches in the past. All in the name of stopping
sales off ebay, circumventing the auction fees.

Back when you could see the names of the bidders
and auction winners, if you suspected a counterfeit,
you could discuss it with bidders that might not be
knowledgeable enough. Then they changed it to where
you could only see the winner. I think that they have
even taken that away now. When you could see the winner's
identity, you could contact them right after the auction,
and they could often check for themselves before the
transaction is complete.

Before the changes, you could even spot 'shill' bidders a
mile away. It was also easy to tell if the winning bidder
was just ingnorant, or buying counterfeits knowingly to
fence them here. If the buyer was ignorant, they would
quickly answer emails and would be obviously angry and/or
frustrated at having been duped. If the person was 'fencing',
the response would be combative, and they often 'disappeared'
from ebay by opening a new account. Back when you could follow
these things, and the Coin Community was a good place to be, we
got together and traced several of these auctions. Now the
counterfeits are better, the info has been gutted, and other
resources have degraded to the point where you are 'on your own'.

Scary.

ebay makes it more difficult than it needs to be to keep a copy of a picture/scan, which is unacceptable when so many listings say "the scan is part of the description." I know that ebay now keeps them around for a while, unlike the past where a seller could delete it minutes after an auction ended, but they do go away, which makes tracking items harder.

(I use a Firefox add-on that allows right-click saving of pictures, but you can also do the View | Page Style > No Style trick.)

I would imagine that it is easier to track stamps than coins, since the perfs are almost like fingerprints.

Does anyone have any pix of known forged stamps they can post?

FYI
A catalogue :

Sad, true, depressing.... I just want to collect and have fun filling my books....

now I can't even get excited when I see something cheap because I feel in my gut too good to be true must be a fake...

like the Zep stamp on ebay for $11 real fake I don't know... I'd rather buy one from here!

That is a cool book to have Rod! The right age, the right condition, the right look...

Are you quite certain the book is authentic, though??

Funny Galf

What is the copyright date on that book? I am mainly interested in the US classics that are being offered on ebay right now.