20p or not 20p that is the Question

And what a question. It's amazing when even the slightest snifter of an opportunity presents itself, the shear volume of scammers in this modern day Internet world suddenly emerge. There can only be one world to describe this category of people and that word is, "Scumbags". Ok... well maybe there's another one, "Stupid".

You may remember, a little while back, the Royal Mint (The clever ones who produce all the physical money) made a bit of a technical boo boo. They made and circulated around 200,000 20 pence pieces without a date on. So.. no date. Doh! This made them all extremely valuable for some reason... a great deal more than 20p in fact.

Some experts claimed any of these 20p pieces were now probably worth around £50. Some sources said they were worth Hundreds of pounds, a few silly sources said they could even be worth Thousands of pounds. Fate had seemingly taken the day off and left Captain Stupid in charge.

Ok, so these botched undated 20 pences were very rare and probably worth £50 each to hardened Coin Collectors.

Step in the scammers / Scumbags / Stupid people...

Within hours of all this, 20 pence pieces started appearing for sale on the popular Auction site, eBay. How many of these were the real McCoy? How many of these auctions were for the genuine coins? Well.... none that I could definitely confirm. Many listings even showed pictures of regular 20 pences with the date either photoshopped off or badly scratched away.

One Seller was trying to sell one at a cost of 11 Million pounds, another at a more modest 9 Million. Each said they would take Legal Action if the Buyer didn't pay. That would have been a very interesting Court case.... I wonder what the eBay fees are on an 11 Million pound item?

To their merit, eBay did remove a lot of these listings. You have to ask though, what thought processes go on in someones mind to attempt and think they can get away with this sort of scam? Criminal Mastermind or Epic Fail?

Ho hum, I doubt it will be the last time this sort of thing occurs. Roll on to the next one...

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Giftware & Collectables