High eBay Feedback is No Guarantee of Integrity or Honesty When we wrote this page, this eBay member's feedback was 25; with 100% positive according to eBay.
Sample Listing
Victoria Young Head Shield Back Sovereign 1884 M - Rare
This is an Excellent Quality Shield Back, Young Head Queen Victoria Sovereign from 1884.
It is listed as rare and was minted in Melbourne.
What's Wrong?
We invest a great deal of time, effort, and cost into creating some of the best photographic coin images on the internet. We strongly object when lazy and dishonest people decide to use them without a by your leave or thanks, doing so in competition with us.
Copyright theft is dishonest. We recommend you avoid doing business with dishonest dealers.
This particular eBay seller not only stole our 1884 gold Victoria shield sovereign image, he has almost certainly deluded himself that his coin is identical condition to the one in our photograph. It's possible he is ignorant of such fine points as grading, or that his coin may or may not be in mint condition, as implied by the use of our photograph of a selected mint state specimen.
It is always possible, even likely, that sellers who steal photographs do not own a similar, and have the intention to defraud potential buyers.
The vendor is not only cheating us by stealing our copyright images, she is fraudulently or ignorantly misleading and deceiving all potential buyers. Gaining pecuniary advantage by deception is the definition of fraud.
He purports to be trustworthy by claiming "Bid with confidence check my feedback", but omits to say that he is dishonest enough to steal other people's hard work.
Price
The seller is asking got a top bid of £156.99 for this coin, which failed to reach his reserve, eBay will make about £3 or £4 in listing fees for this unsold item. He has now relisted it, at a starting price of £160; so if it now sells, he will pay another £16 in fees, possibly plus PayPal fees.If the coin was in the grade of the coin shown in our photograph, we would snap the seller's hand off to buy it at his starting price. This is further evidence that his listing is fraudulent. We do not know his reserve price, so he is probably also fooling himself.
It goes to show that some people will cheat anybody!
eBay Guilty of Negligence or Complicity We reported this example of copyright abuse using our standard Statutory Declaration via the eBay VeRO programme, and eBay have, not for the first time, chosen to ignore our report. We look forward to taking legal action against eBay for their negligence and / or complicity.
Copyright Notice Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.
Buying Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Selling Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Copyright Thieves on eBay We already have a page naming and shaming dealers using our images without permission. It's time we did the same for eBay, although if we include them all, this could be a very long page.
Alphabetical Listing of Other Copyright Theft Sites
Other Web Sites All comments about copyright also cover content of all our other websites including, but not limited to:-