Scam

I have been in this business over 40 years. Perhaps, I am naïve, but I have sent over 200 wire transfers and hundreds of PayPals to the Chinese. I have always received my merchandise and if there was a problem, it was corrected.

Zhang Mei Mei of ChangSha, HuNan, China. has simply scammed me. He offered me a very good gibbsite and the remainder of the lot. I received the remainder but the good piece was never shipped. Of course the bulk of the value was in the best piece.

Since that time, my emails have been ignored,

It is interesting that anything was shipped.

Enclosed is a photo of the piece that I was buying.

If you receive an offer from him zhangmeimeitc@yahoo.cn, please notify me.

Thank you, Chris Wright

Chris,

I've been offered this same exact specimen, and was on my way to the bank to pay for the piece and some others when I read your post. Please email me so we can discuss this further.

All the best,
Brian

I was offered those pieces some time ago, in addition to a group of wulfenites from Urumqi. Fortunately, I already owned two of the wulfenites so I knew something was up....

Ibrahim

Ha ha ha! Ibrahim, thanks for the great laugh; that made my day. Fraud isn't funny, but attempts at fraud by stupid people do somehow tickle my funny bone. Hopefully, the wide exposure here on Mindat will save others from being scammed by this character.

I saw a nice tourmaline with stilbite that I was considering as a gift for someone who has given Jessica many opportunities in the mineralogical world recently. The piece was on auction and coincidentally it was being offered by a friend on the auction website. So I bid on it, had a bit of a battle at the end and decided to give up. Interestingly enough, I noted a surprisingly similar pieces for sale on one of the facebook groups. I contacted the seller and told him what I would pay - an amount similar to what the auction was going for. I didn't hear back, so I contacted him again and still did not hear back - all the while, he was reposting it for sale at an ever decreasing price. My offer was significantly below his price, but I figured the auction was a better indicator of the real value than his guess. But I never heard from him.

Then my friend contacted me and told me (a few weeks later) that he was glad I got some minerals from him, I had won 2 others, just not the tourmaline. I told him I was glad, but had really wanted the tourmaline. At that point he grumbled that the gay who won it was not answering emails and not paying the bill either. He told me he was sorry and that he would have rather sold it to me - less grief. I told him, no problem, there is one surprisingly similar on facebook that I was trying to get. (at this point I am feeling like an idiot!)

My friend asks for the facebook location, which I provide. He then emails me - SIDE BY SIDE, both descriptions (identical word for word) and every picture from both sales (identical in every respect other than the order in which they appeared).

Again, I felt really dumb - but fortunately didn't get taken!

Bob

Bob,

It seems like the person on Facebook didn't have the $$ for the piece and was just trying to sell it at a profit before paying for it. Of course it could have also been a scam, though assuming it wasn't, the whole situation is still frustrating for the first dealer (your friend).

The instance Chris posted is unfortunately not the first time this has happened.... I have seen entire pages lifted from dealer websites and reposted for unassuming victims, I have seen pieces from my website turn up on EBay when I knew without a doubt they were in my basement. I obviously reported those....

If nothing else, the fact that the person sent some gibbsites means that he's probably a real dealer and that someone knows him, so (with effort) he is trackable. A lot of times new dealers in foreign countries don't fully understand the rules (e.g with rocks each individual piece matters, you can't just use a stock photo as would be the case with, say, garments. That may actually be the case here)

I guess it's easier to fall for this kind of thing because there is no way to tell, short of having the luck to recognize the rocks or the photography styles of the online dealers from which the photos were stolen. Still, I don't know what pisses me off more: this, or some jackass lying to my face about a piece that is "not repaired" when I see the damn glue.

On that last note, i once a purchased a mineral specimen from a dealer in India. The actual color was nothing like the pictures he sent. It just so happened that I was in India 2 weeks later, so I paid him a visit. Even when holding the specimen to the computer screen next to his own picture for comparison, he would not admit there was an obvious difference in color. I am not color blind, mind you, but his guilty smile was admission enough. At least he was decent enough to exchange the piece.... There were other things I wanted, but it was still annoying.

Ibrahim

Ibrahim, Your last paragraph of your last post brings up an interesting discussion with some scam implications. About 12 years ago I first went to the Tucson show and while looking thru all their great exhibit cases, I was disappointed seeing the real true colors of some of the specimens in the cases vs the (photo shopped) colors of the identical specimens on the covers of our periodicals such as MR and R&M. Some of the real specimens just did not look anywhere as spectacular as their identical pictured counterparts.

So extending these observations to this thread, I suppose it becomes another type of scam to cleverly photo shop pictures of mineral specimens to make them look MUCH MORE impressive than they really are. This could happen quite often thru straight sales or in auctions etc. This is the situation that you have described. CHEERS........BOB

Bob,

To your point- I suspect that photo-shop to make the specimens look more impressive on magazine covers probably does happen to some extent, however, I noticed that the Tucson club uses really substandard quality lighting in their showcases (I actually used my own lightbulbs), and so specimens don't look anywhere near as good as they could. So, lighting is everything and I suspect that most of what you have observed is simply the difference in the quality of the light used to do the photo versus outright photo doctoring.

There seem to be two kinds of photos, those that merely document and those that are meant to impress. Collectors and exhibtors like to impress, but serious dealers want to document. That avoids buying the piece from a photo and being disappointed with it and asking for a refund. There is probably more truth in the phrase "Better in Person" than hype.

My wife and I have done as lot of photography of minerals and without any photoshopping some look much better in the photo and some look much worse. Very often this is due to lighting and the nature of digital photography. As Chris pointed out, seldom are specimens on display given the ideal lighting that one gives a specimen being photographed and that results in a big difference between the real thing and the image, it does not necessarily have anything to do with photoshopping. On the other hand any cracks and chips in a crystal stand out like a "sore thumb" in a photograph ( assuming the crystal is in focus) whereas in real life it will look much better because the eye "blends away" such imperfections, so it works both ways.

If the purpose is to create a striking image, then much post-camera work of images is often essential. Where would Ansel Adams have been with out it?

If the purpose of a photograph is as a visual description to support 'distance selling' that is a very different matter. In my view, it is essential that the photography is then forensic rather then artistic, designed to show the flaws and not to hide them. Even then, post-camera work has an honest place. Removing the piece of fluff missed when the frame was exposed is OK; removing actual surface blemishes is not. The aim should be that the item is bought with the worst already known, this often resulting in a pleasurable surprise when the specimen is first taken in hand and viewed at natural size and in natural illumination. IMHO, that's the way things should be.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/2012 01:22AM by Owen Lewis (2).

I had the pleasure of attending the sale of a high end collection at Sotheby's auction house in New York (just for fun - I can't afford anything that Sotheby's would be interested in selling
There was an auction catalogue with photos of the specimens, some photos looking better than the specimens themselves, other photos not doing justice to the beauty of the specimen (the "better in person" kind). There was also a line of phone operators taking remote bids.
The rocks that looked "better in person" sold to the hundred or so folk who were physically present, and the ones that looked better on the photo were "won" by the phone bidders. There's a lesson in there somewhere...

SCAM ALERT Just a few minutes ago I received a scam email thru "private mindat message board" The "message" purported to say that a charity thru mindat was to be established in my country (USA) and I would receive $950.00 in return for helping them and needed to give them all my "information". CLEARLY THIS IS AN INEPT SCAM ATTEMPT TO GET PERSONAL INFO...............NO ONE SHOULD FALL FOR THIS!!!!!! CHEERS.........BOB

Blocked the sender.