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I've forgotten to cancel subscriptions, but I still feel bad about donating $2/mo for 3yrs to Wikipedia more than any other one once I found out what they actually spend it on. :marseydepressed:

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I once gave $2 to Wikipedia. I regret it more than the time I got scammed $1,500.

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How did you get scammed for 1500?

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I collect coins. I once purchased an NGC graded 1 oz gold coin on Ebay that was inside the plastic holder. At the time of purchase and shortly after I thought everything was fine, especially because the barcode on the coin holder worked and took me to the NGC website and the verification pics they took when grading the coin matched what I had in hand. Note that because the coin was locked up in plastic I couldn't properly hold it in my hand, all I had to go by were visuals and they were good. Normally when I buy coins on ebay I do all sorts of tests to verify authenticity but hey, this coin was in an NGC slab and they surely knew what they were doing, right? Best other test I could do was weight the holder and see whether that matched the weight of the coin + the known weight of an NGC coin slab That test was passed completely fine so I was feeling pretty decent overall.

Fast forward a year or so and I decided to take the gold coin out of the holder to move it into a display frame I have specifically for gold coins. The second I had it out and in my hand I knew something was wrong. The weight and everything felt fine but gold as a metal has a certain softness to it that this coin was completely lacking (you can try this at home by holding a piece of lead vs a piece of iron, just by feel you can distinguish the metals). Instead it felt hard and jagged, more like how Tungsten feels rather than gold. I immediately tried the ping test for gold (gold pings in a very specific way) and the coin failed that too. The next day I took it in to a nearby jeweler for an XRF test who told me immediately that what I had was almost completely tungsten with a very thin layer of gold plating on top. Of course by now it had been too long to get a refund on ebay and anyways, when I looked for the seller they had deleted their account and disappeared into the ether...

So yeah, that's how I got scammed out of $1,500 and took more than a year to discover it. I also searched more about these fake coin holders because they really are super convincing if looks are all you have to go off of. There were some articles online about how there are special counterfeiting operations in china these days that purchase a legit coin, get it graded, then make thousands of copies of the coin in gold plated Tungsten (which has a very similar density to gold so has the same weight), copy the NGC slab almost exactly (biggest tells were that the fake slabs sometimes had more air bubbles on the coin description label than genuine ones) which they sell off to unsuspecting people like me who think they're getting the real deal.

I've now super soured on the idea of getting graded coins at all, I trust myself much more than these grading companies and now whenever I get a coin in a slab I immediately open it and verify what I have is genuine (regrading costs like $25, not a big deal). The articles I read mentioned this coin bait isn't even the biggest scam China pulls in the precious metals area: these days they produce fake 10 oz bars of gold (current value of genuine ones around $25,000) where to avoid detection by standard methods they use a tungsten core covered with around $10,000 of gold in a layer so thick none of the standard methods people use are able to detect it (If you held it it would feel soft like a genuine 10oz gold bar). They then sell these bars containing only $10k gold to unsuspecting people who think they are getting around $25k worth of gold for full price, and the buyer may well never end up the wiser to the fact that they have been scammed until decades down the line when they try to sell..

!commenters

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https://i.rdrama.net/images/17224743379194624.webp

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RIP


https://i.rdrama.net/images/17187151446911044.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/1735584487Pd3ql1pai5_mfA.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17177781034384797.webp

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dont buy pms, stack sats instead

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It was @JingleWhales realizing he could get more than just two dollars

:marseymischevious:

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Sounds suspiciously close to the amount those crypto scam emails I get saying that they've been watching my goon sessions with a RAT on my computer.

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yeah i get those as well. Recently i got a more sophisticated one that seemed like it was sent from my own mail adress, but it's still obviously just a bluff.

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