wrote:

My two cents: I want the real thing. I don't care about the ethics or
the legality
of the situation; I don't want them. Period. End of sentence. It's
such a pain
to be sifting through eBay auctions, and always needing to add "-
replica -copy -token -mini"
to all of my queries in order to weed out all of the ersatz items and
get to the
actual coins.

A much bigger problem than copies sold as copies is copies sold as
authentic. g I don't think there are that many copies sold as copies
in relation to authentic coins. But the blatant forgery scams on eBay
remain a big problem. I follow these crooks who sell, without
exaggeration, thousands of fakes as authentic, for years. Maybe the
single worst area here on eBay is antiquities. It's so easy to fool
people with this stuff. Sure, you can say, A fool and his money... and
all that. But the reality is that these forgery crooks get away with it.
The solution, right now, is to never buy stuff like this from eBay
sellers you don't know or who haven't been recommended to you by
reliable sources if you don't have expertise is the type of item and the
ways of eBay. Only a partial solution...

--

Consumer: http://rg.ancients.info/guide
Connoisseur: http://rg.ancients.info/glom
Counterfeit: http://rg.ancients.info/bogos