High eBay Feedback is No Guarantee of Integrity or Honesty
When we wrote this page, this eBay member's feedback was 79 with 100% positive according to eBay.

eBay Copyright Thieves
Many eBay vendors use our coin photographs to sell inferior quality coins on eBay. These eBay members are dishonest and should be avoided.
We believe eBay profits from IP rights infringements (copyright theft), and does so knowingly, only removing infringing items reluctantly, if at all.

Sample Listing

1910 Half Sovereign
(to follow)

Seller ID	Item Number	Date	Description	Price
teila4049	220577065036	22nd Mar 2010	1910 Half Sovereign	£0.99 / £80
teila4049	220577066775	22nd Mar 2010	1912 Half Sovereign	£0.99 / £80

What's Wrong?
We invest a great deal of time, effort, and cost into creating some of the best photographic coin images on the internet. We strongly object when lazy and dishonest people decide to use them without a by your leave or thanks, doing so in competition with us.
Copyright theft is dishonest. We recommend you avoid doing business with dishonest dealers.
This particular eBay seller not only stole our high quality images of our Our 1916 Mint Condition George V Half Sovereign Obverse Photograph, he used it to sell his own coin on eBay. He did not mention to potential buyers that the high quality photographs of mint condition coin set were not his own photographs.
It's possible he is ignorant of such fine points, or just plain ignorant.

It is always possible, even likely, that sellers who steal photographs do not own a similar coin, and have the intention to totally defraud potential buyers.
The vendor is not only cheating us by stealing our copyright images, he is fraudulently or ignorantly misleading and deceiving all potential buyers. Gaining pecuniary advantage by deception is the definition of fraud.
Why does he not conjure up his own photograph?

Price
The seller was asking a starting price of £0.99 each, and a BIN (Buy It Now) price of £80 each.
Both items sold to a Buy It Now buyer almost immediately, so we were lucky to actually spot the listings, and teila4049 was equally unlucky.

Stupid or Crooked?
If teila4049 had posted his two coins to us, provided they were genuine, we would have been happy to pay him over £160 for the pair. Selling them through eBay, he will have had to pay eBay a selling fee which is a commission of 10%. If the buyer paid him through PayPal, he will also have had PayPal commission to pay (between 2.9% and 4.9%), so he would receive between £136 and £144 nett.
eBay is full of sellers stupid enough to think that they will get the best price selling by auction on eBay, often they are wrong because they have not checked market prices (perhaps teila4049 tried to sell them to a local gold buyer and was only offered £100 or so). If he managed to find the photos on our websites, it would have been simple for him to pick up the telephone and ask what we were paying. The only downside for him is that we would expect him to pay the postage to us (about £4.50 insured). The advantage to him would be getting about £20 more than using eBay, not having to create the listing, and getting paid more quickly.,

eBay Guilty of Negligence or Complicity
We will be reporting this example of copyright abuse using our standard Statutory Declaration via the eBay VeRO programme, and wait to see if they chose to action or ignore our report. We look forward to taking legal action against eBay for their negligence and / or complicity if they fail to take down the offending material promptly.

A Rare Apology!
Dear Sir/ Madam,
Please accept my sincere apologies for this breac of the rules.
I as the account holder gave my permission for a member of my family soon to leave for Australia to use the account to sell the two items.
I did not view the entry and was not aware that any infringement had been made.
I have learned a hard lesson and can assure you that it will never occur again.
I hope that no harm has been done and he punishment to my family member is quite rightly the loss of the sales.
Once again I apoligise for the misgivings of my actions.
James Todd
Teila 4049

Copyright Notice
Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.

Buying Gold Coins & Bars on eBay

Selling Gold Coins & Bars on eBay

Copyright Thieves on eBay
We already have a page naming and shaming dealers using our images without permission. It's time we did the same for eBay, although if we include them all, this could be a very long page.

Alphabetical Listing of Other Copyright Theft Sites

Other Scams

Other Web Sites
All comments about copyright also cover content of all our other websites including, but not limited to:-

• Chards
  www.chards.co.uk
• Investment Gold Bars & Coins (This Site)
  taxfreegold.co.uk
• General Coins & Jewellery:
  www.24carat.co.uk
• Mint Condition Half Sovereign Obverse PhotographsObverse:
  goldsovereigns.co.uk
• 18 Carat Gold Jewellery:
  www.18carat.co.uk
• 9 Carat Gold Jewellery:
  www.9carat.co.uk