[meteorite-list] yet more ebay junk

From: dean bessey <deanbessey_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:16:38 2004
Message-ID: <20030830212921.31071.qmail_at_web12307.mail.yahoo.com>

I dont know why you guys keep bothering. I realize
that most (But not all) of you have honest intentions
but you are wasting your time. Out of the two current
"instances" neither of these sellers is taking you
seriously and both considers you all nutcases and
certainly will not be influenced by what you say to
them. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out
that the guy selling the "sahara meteorite" couldent
care less that you tell him that he is not selling a
real meteorite (I am not sure if he is even selling a
real rock). He obviously dont care if what he is
selling is real and you guys arent going to change his
mind.
As far as the second guy goes, here is why he thinks
that all of you who contacted him/her are all a bunch
of self rightous morons. I know first hand what crap
that many new meteorite sellers get exposed to because
when I started selling meteorites 4 or 5 years ago 4
or 5 people sent me nasty emails because I wasnt going
along with the color of the sky in their world and I
know other dealers who have gotten nasty welcoming
responses to the business to. In university we called
this type of activity "Froshing:. So personally I dont
think much of your efforts anyway.
However, back to this seller. He has a very high
feedback and obviously knows what he is doing ebaywise
and if you go over his auctions you can easily figure
out that he is not a scammer. That dont mean that he
is wrong on a few items that he sells. He sells a very
wide variety of items. And I know that this might come
as a shock to some of you but there are self rightous
people in many lines of business and you guys are not
the first group that he has been exposed to. I know. I
have gotten nasty emails from lots of self rightous
morons. I have gotten nasty emails about fossils from
people who consider them fake, overvalued, restored,
and who have some moral reason against any fossil
being dug out of the ground and not directly put into
a museum. I have gotten attacks from animal rights
people because I sell teddy bears made out of alpaca
fur. I have gotten people bitching about selling
gemstones from whatever country that happens to be on
Goerge Bushs hit list this morning. Meteorite people
who say that all meteorites should be in a museum. As
the biggest sahara dealer I have on occasion gotten
attacked for "destroying meteorite knowledge" by
selling unnamed, unclassisfied meteorites without
known coordinates.
Want to have some fun? Create a user id and get the
feedback up to around 20. Then make some cast copies
of some extremily rare ancient greek or roman coins
and list them on ebay. The coin nutcases bring things
to a whole new level and that effort would get some
really fun responces.
A typical email from some nut goes like this: First
there is a line about the problem, then some info
about what an expert that they are and then why your
item is somehow bad. An example of this is my personal
favorate - which is an artifact that I once sold on
ebay. Some guy emails me saying that it was a fake and
then tells me how long he has been in business, how
respected he is by other dealers, how knowledgable
that he is blah,blah,blah. Then he goes into detail
about why my item is a fake, things about the item
that proves that it was a fake, and exactly how my
artifact was recently faked (made). And then the final
line that is he "is 100% certain that I am selling a
fake artifact". The only problem was that I was also
100% sure that it was genuine. I never bought it from
another dealer or anything. Me and a couple friends
dug it out of the ground ourselves. We dug up the
grave and pulled the item out of the ground ourselves.
We were the first people to see that artifact in over
1000 years. If there is a better way to be sure that
something is genuine I dont know what it is. But this
guy who supposedly was an artifacts dealer for 30 or
40 years or something, a renounded expert, and was
"100% sure that I was selling was a fake on ebay". If
this guy was saying that I attributed it wrong (A real
possibility since we never exactly got some government
archaelogists to attribute or date the grave for us)
and that the age was 500 or 1000 years different from
what I was selling it as then I might have been more
accomodating. But to say it was a modern fake was
certainly off.
And as a dealer selling a lot of different types of
things you can bet that you guys are not the first
group of people telling him that he is misrepresenting
something. Sometimes (This instance of you guys
emailing him this time probably being a case in point)
of course these people are right. But often they are
not and it is not always friendly helpful emails.
After a while you get numb to it and maybe just send a
nasy "F..k of and die and go on with your business.
And the entire point of my long email here is that is
just what this seller is likely doing.
So you are pretty much wasting your time. And becides,
suppose somebody buys that "Sahara meteorite". If
somebody is going to be such an idiot that he buys
that thinking that it is a real meteorite without
doing even rudimentary investigation (Not even
searching the word meteorite on google to see what a
meteorite is supposed to look like) tell me, is that
somebody who you would feel sorry for? People that
stupid deserved to get ripped off.
I am not saying that you guys are bad or anything or
that you shouldent stop trying to inform peope about
fake meteorites. It is just that you are pissing
people off and this is part of the reason why ebay is
making it so difficult to contact people.
And I also want you to know what you are up against
when you decide to get future people from selling a
fake meteorite. There will always be fale meteorites
on ebay so dont lose sleep over the most recent one.
What would be nice and probably helpful is if somebody
built a nice informational website telling people how
to identify meteorites, what they should look for in a
first meteorite buy, and then host it on geocities or
some free server without mentioning any dealer (So as
not to break any ebay rules) so that dealers can link
their ebay auctions to it. That should get many new
collectors off on the right start.
Although you cant protect the stupidest ones from
themselves so why bother wasting your time trying
Cheers
DEAN

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Received on Sat 30 Aug 2003 05:29:21 PM PDT