Posted By:
davidcyclebackA lot of this comes down to what the buyer paid. For the in dispute seller, he had 5 photos with a BIN of $65 (bid now $5). Even if they are fakes, someone paying $13 per photo is far from the end of the world. People spend $13 for lunch at McDonalds.
I don't know what Jeff paid, but my guess is he paid a reasonable price for the Mathewson photo (I'm assuming he paid a lot more than $12). And isn't that most common buyer question? "Did I pay a fair price?"
I suspect most collectors would rather pay a fair price for a misidentified item than way overpay for a correctly identified item.
I once won an 1800s photo picturing an 'unknown Cuban baseball player' from one of the famous auction houses. When I received the photo I saw the photo clearly was not from the 19th century but the early 1900s, and the player in the picture was not a Cuban nobody but an American Hall of Famer. The funny thing is the two auction house mistakes cancelled each other out financially and the photo was worth about the same! As a collector, the item I received wasn't what I expected, but I still was satisfied with my purchase.