Good Grief, Idiots Will Bid On Anything.

With 10 hours left, this lot of garbage has been bid up to $183.

I count 3 genuine stamps: The 2-cent bank check at upper left, the 50-cent Original Process at lower right, and the 25-cent Bond part perf at center (that cancel is what drew my attention to the lot).

Everything else is utterly bogus.

Even being enamored with the cancel, this is at max a $15 lot.

Seller is using the cop out "One or two of these stamps may not be genuine imperforates" and is proud to tout being a Swedish Tiger "dealer of integrity", a manufactured "award system" I absolutely loathe, as it instills false confidence.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/401577502462

Damn. I can't even get a tenth of that for 6 pages of legit revs. Where are these fools when I'm listing stuff???

There's a lot of fake bidding on ebay......as in c*****s. I always wonder about that "bidder wishes to remain anonymous."

Click on the list of bidders for this lot. See anything suspicious?

Swedish Tiger "dealer of integrity" system is weighted very heavily upon ebay badly flawed feedback system; I have no idea what he was thinking when it did it this way. It prevents me from ever recommending what is otherwise a good website.

Why people drop good money on this kind of listing is beyond me. No doubt the buyer will mount these in their album and at some point start posting about how great ebay is; the only thing we can do is continue to educate.

ebay has some great sellers, the trick is to find them. Hint, they are the ones who are asking reasonable prices for their quality material. If you see a listing for a high value stamps at 2% of catalog and end up winning the item at 5% of catalog, then the chances that you snagged a great deal are pretty low.

How many of the stamp/cover listings on ebay are 'fresh' ('fresh' being defines as material which has not been previously offered for sale in the last 10 years). Very, very, very few. The chances of making a 'find' with recycled material is low; yet so many folks buy on ebay thinking that they are getting great deals; ebay peddles wishful thinking. This is why I have always been down about 'great find' stories on ebay. Sure, it happens occasionally but there are hundreds of thousands of transactions which are not. Human nature is that we always remember when something 'hits', not the majority of times when it 'misses'.
Don

The percentage of new/fresh material is low, but simply due to the raw numbers involved means that there ARE new and fresh listings every day. The chore is in finding and identifying them; separating what from chaff, so to speak.

I find great material on ebay on a fairly regular basis (see my post yesterday about the wine stamp item)... but what people don't realize is the amount of time it takes to scour listings and that it must be done on a regular basis to achieve the best results. I probably spend the equivalent of a 40-hour week over every 1-2 months on ebay. Setting up specific searches in various categories, determining what "buzzwords" and red flags can identify listings where the seller may not realize what they have, thus increasing your odds of success, and scrutinizing many many MANY listings, most of them ultimately useless. And of course having the prerequisite experience and knowledge to determine the genuine from the fraudulent.

I disagree with the sentiment " ebay peddles wishful thinking" as that is true of ANY venue and people that approach it blindly. It's no different from late night infomercials and shopping channels peddling collectibles, or people scouring garage sales. It's the get-rich quick mindset.

Now if you want to say that ebay caters to a particular type of clientele, and certain types are more susceptible to the allure, then I would agree with that.

As with any other source of material, ebay CAN be used to great effect, but to do it right and safely requires approaching it methodically as a job, doing your homework and performing due diligence, not just jumping in casually.

The problem isn't the platform or the material, it's the approach.




All bidders are anonymous. It's not a choice any more. ebay anonymizes ALL buyer IDs.

On the other hand, sellers wanting to keep feedback private is a completely different matter. That sets off alarm bells.

I'm not seeing anything unusual about the bidders on this listing. None of the bidders have an excessively high percentage of bids with this seller, which would imply shill bidding.

"I find great material on ebay on a fairly regular basis..."

Not me. In the past 5 years especially, the amount of worthwhile material on ebay has greatly decreased. I don't search in one narrow field, I look in 4-5 broader areas of collecting.

Much of the material that shows up on ebay starts out at the auction houses and is thoroughly picked and processed after already being picked and processed multiple times. The volume sellers pay insane money at venues such as Rasdale and extract, out of necessity, every single penny for every single item in those lots. There are exceptions but not many.

The best finds and deals are NOT through high-profile high-volume sellers. Even if a lot ends up being legit, you can be assured that competition will be fierce and you'll and up paying market rate.

Additionally, buying from a high-volume seller on ebay is absolutely no guarantee that the material is as advertised.

No, it's low-volume sellers and/or sellers listing material outside their core competencies which is where you'll likely achieve the best results (this approach is for experienced collectors, not the novice).

Yes, the low volume sellers is where one is going to find worthwhile purchases/material. However, in my experience these sellers are becoming much "fewer and far between" on ebay.

... as ebay drives away more medium and small sellers in an effort to become the next Amazon.

The days of ebay as the collector's paradise are sadly likely coming to an end.

Hi Dan,
I thought the listing you posted epitomized wishful thinking. The seller knew to sell these as a lot (no identification of the stamps), starting at $0.01, declare them to be 'extraordinary', and tout his Swedish Tiger rating. All wishful thinking to me. The bidders are also appear to me to be operating on wishful thinking, hoping that the stamps are what they appear to be and that they are getting a good deal.

When we go to Walmart or Amazon, we feel confident that the prices we will pay will be competitive. But we do not think that we will somehow come away with something far below actual market value; something that we can easily turn right around and sell at a great profit. To me, a large part of ebay is wishful thinking.
Don

Don, I would characterize the seller as engaging in calculated flummery rather than wishful thinking. The only wishing involved is that a few suckers will take the bait and start bidding against each other.

How about describing what's wrong with these stamps? Making the claim is not going to convince many people without an explanation. What's the evidence that all but three of the stamps are "not genuine"? Are they photocopies? Forgeries? Altered from what they used to be? I'd like to know in some detail.

Drew - they are all genuine US revenue stamps. The comment that all but 3 are 'utterly bogus' is because they have had perfs trimmed off to give the appearance of imperf or part-perf stamps, which are much more valuable than the normal perforated versions. It's obvious from looking at them, and the seller is well aware of it as well...

To extend what mdroth states, it's not only that they have been trimmed, as some could be argued genuine based *solely* on margin size, but additionally they are wrong ink colors, impressions, cancel types, and cancel dates to be genuine imperfs or part perfs.

I particularly enjoyed the 1869 and 1870 cancels sprinkled throughout.