Shanus-REA suit

[WhenItWasAHobby]

Originally Posted by ls7plus

......I've posted before about studying the area of coin collecting for a period of more than 20 years, because I think that its 120-year head start as an organized hobby over ours gives a reasonably accurate preview of what ours is likely to go through (collectors thinking patterns seem remarkably similar, whatever their focus). Coins have also experienced a huge number of frauds and scammers over time. I think its just indigenous to human nature whenever big $$$ are out there.

How true.

As posted many months ago on this forum, PCGS, the coin grading division of Collectors Universe (also PSA's parent company), filed a suit against at least six of their own authorized coin dealers (and perhaps even 10 additional dealers) for submitting doctored coins.

http://www.coinlink.com/News/counter...universe-pcgs/


Recently, this lawsuit was thrown out of Federal Court. The reasons why were not exactly clear and I've read a myriad of message board posts and blogs that seem to be more speculative than factual stating things such as CU couldn't sue someone for failing to do their own duty or that they weren't truly fraud victims, etc.

http://www.coinworld.com/articles/fe...-doctors-suit/


The interesting thing was that 3 of the 6 defendants were members of PNG, the Professional Numismatists Guild which has an extensive Code of Ethics including issues concerning coin doctoring and misrepresentation. However, as I recall reading, shortly after the CU lawsuit was filed, there was a problem that there were no clear guidelines regarding what exactly constituted coin doctoring versus cleaning, etc. As a result, PNG drafted a definition of what exactly entailed "coin doctoring" and when the members voted recently to add this definition to their guidelines, the members voted it down - supposedly because it wasn't clear enough.

http://www.pngdealers.com/item.php?i...&category_id=2


So in summary, if the card hobby wants to have some accountability and credibility, they're going to have to do more than make dealers and auction houses form some professional association. For starters, they will have to set some clear, unambiguous guidelines what constitutes fraud or what is ethical and what isn't in the card hobby regarding alterations and disclosure issues. That in itself could be a daunting task since there have been some threads on this board that have debated those issues ad nauseum regarding soaking, cleaning, pressing, etc. In my cynical opinion, I don't see this happening. I hope I can be proven wrong.