The darkest time in the coin collecting world...

dan1ecu · July 1, 2003 3:59AM

For those of you who have been collecting for a long time (decades), was there ever a period of time that you would consider the "Dark Ages" of coin collecting? Was there a time that dishonesty and sleazy practices were the norm?

When I was a kid, I many local coin dealers (not all) had reputations of being dishonest. Many dealers who sold through magazines like Coin Prices sold junk. There were "investment companies" that ripped people off big time with supposedly "rare" coins.

That was back in the early 80's, and things as I remember them were pretty bad. Many people, I think, were driven from coin collecting because of all of the dishonesty that they saw.

What's the worst time that you can remember for coin collectors? With certification services and the internet, do you think things could ever get that bad again?

Dan

keets · July 1, 2003 4:05AM

pre-grading companies, pre-internet was indeed a scary time to collect. the irony is that i'll probably be called on the carpet for that staement by the same members that caution against buying anything sight unseen or raw coins altogether. that was the norm back then. with shops and shows less prevalent then now, things were risky at best.

al h.

tjkillian · July 1, 2003 4:11AM

Keets is right. Before the internet and grading companies, how was one supposed to get educated? The sleezeball dealer around the corner? How would you even know about big, national dealers? There are no coin magazines on the supermarket rack. Your only help was the "Red Book". New coin collectors need to have a mentor from an more experienced collector, regardless of age.

Tom

dorkkarl · July 1, 2003 4:29AM

today. in 35 years, i have never seen more ripoffs around than there are today.

K S

RBB617 · July 1, 2003 7:06AM

dorkkarl - Could you expand on your comment, please? I am a 4 month board lurker (this is my first post), and have learned a lot more in the last 4 months than I expected, but this topic is very interesting and I hadn't seen it addressed quite like this until today. I first started to collect in 1978 at the age of 9, and got frustrated with the hobby due to what I thought were dishonest dealers and junk from mail order companies. I loosely picked the hobby up again in 1998 when I put together a date set commerating the birth of my first son. This year he showed an interest, and I, in turn, picked up the hobby again with a vengence.

I have read the threads about the eBay scammers, the "bull" market for coins and the overpriced/low quality coins sold through magazine ads, but, generally, I have found (or maybe thought naively) that if you have half a brain, you have a chance. This seems very different than when I was young, and only had access to some magazines and dealers.

You have obviously been doing this longer and consistently more seriously than I have, so please, let us know why you feel the way you do. Thanks.

Cam40 · July 1, 2003 7:22AM

I feel with the advent of 3rd party grading companies and the internet et al, that the sleazy con artists
in the hobby are just going to find what they do alittle more difficult as so many collectors have learned so much
of the truth about these less-than-honest people that the crooks would probably find it easier,and more
profitible,to just go with the flow and be honest too.Like most of us.

I can imagine in the future it being every increasingly difficult to scam someone about a coin they might be selling.
People are so much more educated on coins than they were say, 10 years ago.

So coin crooks? Your days are definitly numbered.

Conder101 · July 1, 2003 7:28AM

<< <i>When I was a kid, I many local coin dealers (not all) had reputations of being dishonest. Many dealers who sold through magazines like Coin Prices sold junk. There were "investment companies" that ripped people off big time with supposedly "rare" coins. >>

I remember that, it was in the 70's....and the 80's....and the 90's.....come to think about it it's still going on today.
(I'm sure it was going on before the 70's as well, it's just that i wasn't active before then so I don't have personal memories of it. In reallity though you can go back to periodical from any era and find the same complaints about the local dealers, the advertisers selling junk, and people getting ripped off on so-called "investments". As the saying goes "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Elcontador · July 1, 2003 7:38AM

Karl, I think you're wrong on this. Yes, there are more ripoffs in terms of absolute $ amounts now because there is more money to be made these days re Registry Sets, etc. than earlier. However,
we have access to much more information than ever before.

I started collecting in the 1960s, and excepting one or two old guys who wanted to help a young kid get off on the right foot, virtually every dealer out there I saw tried to rip me. Standard operating procedure: you buy a BU coin, but it's an Unc. when you try and sell it back to the dealer.

Info like we have available now re cleaned, whizzed & AT'd coins were unknown then. You had a Redbook, a Coin World, and hoped that coin you ordered was as nice as the seller said it was (and it usually wasn't), and if you didn't like the coin, it was always a pain in the *** to return it.

You'd buy a coin at a bid board and hope it wasn't whizzed, because you really didn't know what to look for, and even if you did, you couldn't tell much with the lighting around you.

Eventually I got disgusted and did something more constructive with my time, like trying to get girls to have sex with me

What got me back into the hobby was a combination of slabbing, coupled with more available information and a curiosity of what the stuff I had collected years earlier was worth.

cladking · July 1, 2003 11:12AM

There have always been many ways to get burned in this hobby and this will likely
never change. Today there are very few of the outright crooks operating. They have
been shut down by the grading services and the easy flow of information and know-
ledge. Sure there are those few who sell coins at two or three times there normal
wholesale value, but these are generally exactly what the seller says they are. While
the prices are inflated it's otherwise a fair deal. The biggest thing that has gotten most
of the crooks out of the business is the simple fact that this ain't where the money is
anymore. The crooks tend to travel to whatever field has lots of growth and lots of mon-
ey. If the hobby continues its torrid growth of the last few years then some of the newer
people will get a chance to deal with the crooks. Just watching out for deals that are too
good to be true will protect you from most of their ripoffs.

The real dark days of coin collecting were in the mid 90's. Things were dead. Coin shows
looked like old folks conventions and prices of most coin just continued to slide. There was
also a sense that things could be much worse and soon would be. It was the moderns that
finally woke up in '95-'96 and at least stopped the slide in the market. By mid '98 there were
a few baby boomers starting to trickle back into the market in anticipation of the states coins.
And soon there was a flood of new collectors.

While the high priced coins and the great rarities may not have lost much ground in the mid-90's,
most of the less expensive coins did. These included many nice collector issues even in popular
series. This won't show up so much in the price guides because they don't show that many nice
coins could be bought for 20% to 80% of the listed prices.

There was a very real fear that the hobby might not be able to revive or even to replace its aging
collector base. -Of course, it's still not a done deal.

roadrunner · July 1, 2003 12:19PM

I'll have to agree that the mid-1990's looked like the end to the coin hobby. After 5-6 years of dispair it looked like things would never come back. But they did.

Another period that I consider to be the true Dark Age was 1974-1978. During this period there were more junk coins than you could shake a stick at. It was hard to get a coin from a Coin World ad that was worth the retail $$ that you paid. The auction scene wasn't much better. I do remember Tom Waggoner, Renrob and a few other folks who actually sold fair value. But as a rule, you started at least 30% in the hole (often more) from your local dealer to the biggest ones. One of tuffest bunch was the Kansas City / St. Louis Connection. From heavily scratched bust dollars to cleaned BU Barber halves, it was tough to get a nice coin out of some of those dealers.

roadrunner

mercurynut · July 1, 2003 12:26PM

What a great question!!!!! This is a thought I have to ponder before making an intellegent comment.

JLW · July 1, 2003 12:42PM

<< <i>today. in 35 years, i have never seen more ripoffs around than there are today.

K S >>

I disagree! This is the age of enlightenment and information, I think in general the internet and specifically sites such as these help educate and in turn PROTECT newer collectors and the uninformed so that they may make educated, intelligent purchases. Just MHO.
Joe

numonebuyer · July 1, 2003 12:59PM

I would say late 70s to early 80s. The US Mint wasn't turning out anything exciting. No silver (or silver premier) proof sets were being minted yet. No prestige proof sets were being minted yet. The clad proof sets were as cheap looking as you could get (the holders were horrible and broke easily). The US Mint was not producing the Silver or Gold bullion, yet. The Susan B. Anthony dollar was a bust. There just wasn't much to get excited about.

Numonebuyer

numonebuyer · July 1, 2003 1:01PM

As far as dishonest dealers. I think there are more of those today than ever, but with the Internet comes access to more honest numismatists than most of us would ever have known or been able to talk to in a life time.

Numonebuyer

1956Quarter · July 1, 2003 1:07PM

Tough question. In my opinion though, it went dark when the same thing happened to coin collecting that happened to other "HOBBIES" before and since. They turned from something fun, inexpensive, and enjoyable into "Big Business". Someone somewhere came up with an idea of how to turn yet another affordable hobby into a money making machine. This has happened with Baseball Cards, Old Toy Trains, Stamps, Coins, Slot Cars, Automobiles, Movie Posters, and PEZ Dispensers, I can go on and on and on, the list is almost endless. The "Fun" days were when you could go out with a few bucks, and I'm talking $5 or $10 not $500 or $600, and go to a local shop or two and pick out some nice coins for your collection. You could buy what you could afford and in just about any condition, and it was great. You could get excited about finding a VG 1929 Mercury Dime for $1.00 or a XF Buffalo Nickel for 25 cents, it didn't matter that it wasn't MS68 or some big business designation. I was very very lucky I suppose in that I got hooked up with a very nice reputable dealer early on, and he taught me the ropes of how to grade and how to collect. But the bottom line was that it was fun. As soon as the big business Guru's moved into the hobby and set up shop everything changed. Prices went up, average coins that were not keys were melted and look on with distain, and the little man or junior collector was basically pushed out of the way and out of the hobby. Heck, they even downcast the 50 Cent Whitman folder and made big business out of the holders, albums, and storage medium. These so called grading services are a by product of that evolution which help to perpetrate this money churning slash investment machine to keep it alive, but only for those who can afford to play the game, and believe. I do NOT believe. I know how to grade, and I've said many times that I've never agreed with any grade on a slab, and I simply refuse to purchase coins in them until the grade on the holder agrees with the grade on the coin. I don't expect this to even happen, there's no money in it.

ElectricEye · July 1, 2003 2:12PM

ignore dorkkarl, everyone else does...

CaptainRon · July 1, 2003 4:21PM

I really cannot relate to how it was years ago since I was not collecting back then. But have learned that there was numerous problems such as whizzed coins, scamming dealers, and just not enough info to educate a new or lowend collector that may only spend between 500 to 1000 dollars a year on coins. That and not being able to have the opportuninity to see that many coins.

However today I believe there are just as many if not more problems to worry about. Granted today there are grading companies, but I have read probably a hundred of threads about people b*&tching how bad grading company "A" is, and how bad grading company "B" is. In fact I even recall reading about counterfieted coins being slabbed (A thread about a 1916d merc comes to mind). I have been told that even with the big three there can be big differances. Like buying a NGC MS64 morgan will probably only grade a 63 in a PCGS slab because NGC uses ANA standards and PCGS uses there own stricter guidlines. If this is not true sorry, but this has been told to me by numerous board members.

Or people saying that this coin was graded in a green holder so it is under graded, or this coins slab has a 10 didget seriel number so it should be fine opposed to the same companies that have 8 or 9 numbers or something of the sort. Or trying to be told that this coin was graded before they used designations and it should upgrade. Even to the informed new person this can be tricky, because for some of us we just don't have the skill at eyeing it out yet. Granted we know about it, just not experienced enough to be able to see it all the time.

Plenty of more information is at hand - Yes there is plenty of information at hand to help out the new collector, but how many people start out reading this forum or another companies forum or magazines before they actually start collecting. I would have to guess not to many. It's after they buy there first slabbed coin before most would even know about this place IMO. Or have purchased a few raw coins and they want to see what they are worth so they do there nice little search on the internet and find PCGS coin price guide. They then believe that is what they should be paying for coins or what there coins are worth. Took me a few weeks and a few bad buys to realize that this was a mistake.

I don't believe that most new people realize that a guide is just a starting point to work on a price for a coin, and there are to many sellers that use that to their advantage. Like listing a coin and saying it is very good or fine, and in reality the coin has problems to net down even lower, such as corrsion, pits, dinged rims, are cleaned. Hard to tell from an online pic.

Now today we have plenty of information at our hands as new collectors to help us along, but with that info comes even more confusion and doors of opportunity to get burned on as well. Such as the designations of Cameo's and Deep Cameos, Full Torch, Full Bands, Full head etc etc etc. Now as a new collector knowing these classifications are out there, it is real easy to get suckered into purchasing a raw coin that you are told that encompises these traits, just to have it slabbed or told by someone else, that it was close but no cigar. Money paid for a premium quaility coin just wasted.

And don't get me started on the late night TV ads. I believe most of the time they are robbing everyone.

How about them MONSTER Toners out there, how many of them have just come out of the oven. The informed newbie knows that toned coins can bring in a hefty premium. But until recently I did not know that they can also be worth less if the toning is butt ugly, or even created artificially. I still am not sure I could not tell most of the time, which scares me away from raw toned coins, even the ones that I think are awsome looking, I just to afraid of getting burned. So hence I am getting scammed out of possible legit nice coins by fear.

Now onto Ebay, Yahoo, or Bidz or any of the other online auctions (Except Teletrade, Heritage, or Bowers) How many of you guys/gals out there that actively use these avenues to get coins, can honestly say they have never been screwed by a misleading description or picture. Just about every auction that posts BLURY or no pictures is trying to sell something for more then it is or worth. Think about all of the coins that you just skip over as junk as you are browsing, yet you see bids on them. I now about a year ago that was my bid. I hate to admit it, but I have been burned more times on-line then I care to count, that is why I will not use ebay to buy coins that I can saftly get from my dealerfor perhaps a few dollars more. Yes I was a sucker that read the desciption and was gullible enough to believe or greedy enough to make myself believe that I was doing the right thing so I bid and bought.

LITTLETONS - Well enough said.

I have been to some dealers that have been absolutely horrible, luckily I have been stuborn and stuck around the hobby and have finally found a couple local dealers that are great for me.

And this is just my opinion, and I hope I don't get sucked into it to heavily, but I probably will, "Registry Sets". I believe this leads to a lot of scamming. How often in the old days did people pay hundreds of dollars for a penny that was just minted that year.

As I ponder over all of my mistakes over the last year or so in collecting coins, I realize that I cannot be the only stupid schmuck out here (At least I hope), and it amazes me that I still want to collect. But you know what, I just got done looking at my walking liberty set which is comprised of mostly circulated coins. Even if I did get screwed on many of my purchases to complete the set, I still love the beauty of them and the pride in myself for being able to complete it. Know that makes it worth it. Now a year later the one thing I know for sure is, I still know squat about coins, but I'm addicted to the gorgeous art work on coins and the history that goes with them. I love the challenge of finding the ones I need for a set, and the new knowledge from you guys. And last but not least I love the fact that even if a spend to much on a coin, it's a hell of a lot better for me then pissing it away at the bar like I use to, now that was a waste of money.

Just my opinions, from a new guy in the hobby.
Ron

CaptainRon · July 1, 2003 4:55PM

All I had to do was look a few posts down and I found this one about people describing how newbies can get burned by slabbed coins.

Link

Now was it this bad 15 years ago. I certainly hope not.

Ron

Conder101 · July 1, 2003 7:43PM

How's this for a dark time, the mid 60's when the grovenment actually debated legislation to make coin collecting a criminal act.

FoundingFather · July 1, 2003 10:05PM

As I see it, the truth of the matter is, there has and will always be, dishonesty and crooks. I believe that today's collectors are much better off, if for no other reason than today's modern tools have made it a lot easier and safer, with more ways to check on people and coins that aren't infront of you. Sure, there are still as many ways to steal and cheat, but today's tools (ranging from getting slabs from established Ebay sellers with long track records to running a seller or company by your fellow collectors in a forum) offer some additional protections on average. If you are going to be naive and not do your homework, buying raw coins from unknown people, or aren't going to do due dilligence on a seller or method, then no amount of tools will protect you. If you are like the average cautious coin collector today who is the type to check records and reputations, then you are probably a lot safer than that same type of average cautious coin collector before the internet. People who are inclined to use the tools benefit from greater overall safety, especially now with slabs.

mercurynut · July 1, 2003 10:12PM

Great question! I am going to ponder that thought before answering.

MrEureka · July 1, 2003 10:41PM

What's the worst time that you can remember for coin collectors?

In my lifetime, no time has been any better or worse than any other time. There have always been plenty of pitfalls and plenty of opportunities. A smart collector will always find a way to build a great collection. A stupid collector will always find a way to lose his money.

The darkest time in the coin collecting world...

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