$27K Stamp Auction Final Bid on eBay - Fraud or Deal of the Century?

FC-Treasure · Feb 22, 2017

I was cruising eBay's US stamp sold listings the other day and spotted this auction. Basically a seller from France listing a collection of stamps with some decent early US stamps, some with condition problems, but there were a series of potential $1,000++ stamps. But there was this one picture that had something unusual in it. (see image). Given that this is eBay and no-one in their right mind would list something that valuable in a collection, I've got to assume the seller placed it there and it is a modern repro. Just the act of doing that though would invalidate the whole auction for me, so I don't know why the bid went so high

So did the buyer get taken? I don't know, there were supposedly a 100 more pictures, so maybe they were not bidding up the auction based on a possible inverted jenny...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/US-Stamp-Collection-/182397145349

Mackaydon · Feb 22, 2017

The Inverted Jenny casually placed in that collection would raise the red flag for me.
Doubly so when it appears not to be a stamp originally placed on that page.
This site:
https://invertedjenny.com/society-of-inverted-jenny-owners
might be able to shed more light on that stamp.
Don.....

steelheadwill · Feb 25, 2017

Same seller happens to list another collection including an IJ,
page 8 here.
USA Stamps Collection | eBay
EDit: seller removed this listing due to 'error', putting an IJ into a large collection without mentioning it is not legal fraud IMO, just a bit more creative than I like to see.

FC-Treasure · Feb 25, 2017

Interesting, yeah, definitely fraud. Think that collection was assembled via photoshop.

steelheadwill · Feb 27, 2017

FC-Treasure said:
Interesting, yeah, definitely fraud. Think that collection was assembled via photoshop.

Make as many sales as possible in short period, empty PP acct before disputes arise, reopen new ePay & PP account, do it all again. One of the oldest & effective scams on Epay.
sometimes difficult to ID these, one sign will be their pos feedback will be buying n selling low value items. Protection from EPay n PP ONLY APPLIES IF THEY CAN RECOVER FUNDS FROM SCAMMERS ACCOUNT, Which is usually empty by the time disputes come in.
caveat emptor all :icon_thumleft: