FAKE COINS BEING LISTED AMONG GENUINE COINS

[joolliaa]

I have used ebay for many years to casually look at coins and purchase fairly regularly as a hobby. Of increasing concern to me is the amount of FAKE coins being listed. It is getting quiet rediculous how many there are, and often in the minds of the FAKE coin sellers is to make some cash out of that cheap FAKE they bought off someone else for a few dollars. Why is ok for FAKE coins (or tokens, or uncertified coins as some sellers seem to call them) to being listed in the same place as geniune coins. There are many questionable issues why FAKES appear in the same place on ebay, where so many 'genuine' coin collectors search and buy, resulting in people being misled, or in fact blatently ripped off by sellers who knows exactly what they are doing when they list their FAKE coins where they know coin collectors look and buy. There are numerous cases in the feedback comments given to these sellers that i have read. Whether its listed with a small mention of it being a 'token' or 'uncertified' or the desciption wording is carefully chosen in the listing ambiguously to let the buyer decide if its real or not,  for example that 1930 penny that was miraculously found in an old tin in the back shed with a few other pennies with a small mention of 'uncertied' at the end of the listing, the genuine collector hopefully smells the rat and keeps well away from those ones. But there are a many that have been ripped off. There may be a place for FAKES for some people, but to selI them among geniune coins is in my view nothing but 'deceptive', and i certainly have been reporting such sellers activities to ebay, and maybe if more people do that something will be done about it. One could use several equivament arguments like what if  it was a fake expensive handbag listed with genuine ones etc. Selling FAKE coins with GENUINE ones is just not right somehow.  In any case the increasing numbers, quality and frustration of these fakes may eventually lead to a reduced interest in using the ebay website and possibly using other places to make a more trustworthy purchase. For me i take a few seconds to report FAKE coin sellers to ebay in the hope that something is done, but who knows.  Should there be a seperate area for these FAKE coins? Have other ebay users had issues or concerns, and Is there a solution?  (Thanks for reading).

[maxine*j]

Hundreds of thousands of things are misrepresented on eBay every day, sometimes innocently and sometimes intentionally.  You can't police this place, nor can eBay,  even if it wanted to.

We can only hope that more buyers educate themselves, learn to buy from reliable sellers, file SNAD reports when they receive misrepresented items, get over the notions that there are free lunches and deals too good to be true. 

As for your reporting items, go ahead but remember that with millions of listings from millions of sellers, there is not enough staff, expertise, or time in the world to investigate such reports, and eBay cannot merely accept anything they were told by anyone and start pulling listings.   What if the report is from a rival seller trying to kill the competition, or from someone unqualified to make a determination, or from someone with a personal grudge?   The list of spurious reasons for reporting is long.  If you were a seller, how you would react if you had listings pulled by eBay based on nothing more than a report by an anonymous person, whose knowledge or motives remain unknown to eBay and to you?

Finally, read the eBay Terms of Use:  "... while we may help facilitate the resolution of disputes through various programs, eBay has no control over and does not guarantee the existence, quality, safety or legality of items advertised; the truth or accuracy of users' content or listings; the ability of sellers to sell items; the ability of buyers to pay for items; or that a buyer or seller will actually complete a transaction or return an item."
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.html

Truly, as in all marketplaces, caveat emptor.

(Thanks for reading.)