[meteorite-list] Fake Moldavites

From: AL Mitterling <almitt_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:07:42 -0500
Message-ID: <476BC8AE.1030209_at_kconline.com>

Hi Dirk and all,

It may be that the seller of the material was unaware that the material
was fake. Probably bought it from the source making it or a source they
trusted and that source bought it from the crooks. I've ran into this
before with meteorites. A person buys from their reliable, but
unknowledgeable source and ends up with meteorwrongs. This happened with
so called North Carolina Meteorites that were sold to a distributor and
ended up at a show I do and for that matter all over a section of the
country. The organizers of the show asked me to verify the specimens.
The owners of the "specimens" were insistent they were authentic but
they simply were not meteorites and the seller was asked to not sell
them until they had them verified in writing by a lab (from my
suggestion). The owners later on found out that they weren't after their
supplier was alerted to the scam and thanked me.

It's easy to tell if the moldavites are fake, the toxic ones are from
China and the non-toxic ones are real :-)

drtanuki wrote:

> I and the show owner were unaware of the fake
>material being sold as moldavite otherwise the seller
>would have been thrown out of the show.
>
>Dirk Ross...Tokyo
>
>
Received on Fri 21 Dec 2007 09:07:42 AM PST