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That crap has been going on at ebay since they started. Even worse, the scumbags that artificially tone or color coins. It's been like a year since I looked but there was a popular seller on ebay with a couple thousand glorious feedbacks who sold obviously "painted" coins. He was using some sort of copper colored nail polish to make all his coins look nice and red. The worse part.....he was buying his candidate coins on ebay and you could compare his bought coins to painted coins he was selling and clearly see what he was doing. Nonetheless, the ignorant masses kept giving him positive feedback.
To prove I was right, I bought one myself and took it into the lab. A couple rinses with acetone and xylene revealed an ugly coin under his paint.
As long as there are ignorant buyers, there will be crooked sellers willing to cater to them.
Another old trick was brown wax shoe polish then heated for color. That was done for awhile though I haven't seen one for awhile . You would notice color running off of the coin if it wasn't not done right.
If there's one thing life has taught me, EVERY angle that can be taken WILL be taken when money's involved! Don't doubt yourself when you get that "Not so fresh" feeling. There's no mystery to it. No conspiracy. When it looks like crap, feels like crap, and smells like crap, guess what - it's crap!!
This went on way before ebay.
I bought coins on bid boards long ago and years later figured out that the pretty looking cents I had where whizzed or recolored.
Before TPGs it was probably more common because dealers that did it routinely weren't confronted because there was no real authoritative way to say an expert said they were reworked, it was only your opinion against theirs.
In the big coin magazines there were dealers that ran ads for years in the 70s and 80s, one in particular always offered all of the IHCs from 1900-1908 in "BU red" for reasonable prices like $10-20 each your choice of dates and the pics in the ad were awesome but the coins were all recolored. Same with wheats, some dealers had ads listing every wheat in "BU red" for decent prices but they were recolored. Lots of those coins from that era are still around and probably grew some skin but won't grade. They had some very good technique, if you see coins done that way they look too good to be true. It's a shame that it wiped out a lot of coins that were nice AU or slider uncs or toned uncs.
The only thing that's changed is now we complain about "ebay junk", back then it was "mail order junk".
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