R-1 to R-5 Errors: Overprint Shift

The minor shifting of the overprint is another common error that many collectors care as little about as the general public. Bart suggests from the photos in his book that a 'minor' overshift is less than three eighths of an inch. On a $1 note, for example, this could mean that the green seal in the word ONE was shifted over to either extreme of the word but was still contained within it. Bart lists a modern (1995) $1 with a minor shift as having a value of about $50 in perfect condition, but I think that's too high for an error that is so common and has so little eye appeal.

Moderate and major shifts are cool, and their prices reflect the public's greater appreciation. These errors just look too wrong to have escaped the BEP (that's the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, not the Black Eyed Peas), whereas the minor shifts are actually no big deal even to the Mint.

Despite how common this error can be, in the past two weeks, there have only been 35 eBay auctions for overshifted prints, but 5 of these were for shifts of the 1st or 2nd printing of the bill. Of the 19 remaining, there were only 10 with sales completed. This is because the other 4 had starting bids that were too high.

$2. Series: 1953. Buy-It-Now: $43.20. Condition: XF. Date: 4/29/10

This note's overshift is so minor as to confer it almost no additional value; it's a mere curiosity. Despite its age and the cool red seal, in extra fine condition, it's only worth about $20.

$1. Series 1995. Condition: F+. 2 bids. $14.49. Date: 4/29/10.

This note has a minor-to-moderate southerly shift of the overprint, most noticeable with the green seal falling out of the word ONE. It's been pretty highly circulated, which speaks to the public's lack of appreciation for the error: A more noticeable and exciting error would have been pulled sooner. Bart's book lists this as worth about $10 because of the condition; I wouldn't have paid even that much, since you can just pull one yourself from circulation the next time someone hands one to you.


$5. Series: 1950b. Best Offer: $33.95. Condition: F. Date: 4/19/10.

Here's another poor decision on the part of the buyer. This bill's overprint shift barely qualifies as an error and certainly doesn't qualify as interesting. Making matters worse, the bill's relatively poor condition renders it nearly worthless. I'd have paid $5 for it.



$2. Series 1976. 21 bids. $65. Condition: Unc. Date: 4/19/10
Bart's excellent book (3rd ed., p 173) notes that while errors on $2 bills are generally quite rare, there happened to be a lot for this particular series. The seller, probably unaware of this, wrote about how rare the bill was. Nonetheless, Bart suggests a $250 price for such a note, and this one, despite heavy bidding, only went for a quarter of that. Sorry, but I couldn't get a larger photo.

An identical note from the same seller garnered even less interest, with 19 bids bringing it up to only $30.02 with shipping, a great deal for sure.


$1. Series 1969b. Condition: VF. 23 bids. $76. 4/18/10.
The seller listed it as a major ('extreme') shift, but technically it's only 'moderate.' For example, the green seal is still touching the word ONE. Still, it's pretty eye-popping. According to Bart's book, it's worth pretty much what the seller paid for it, but I have a feeling that this was still a good deal. It's hard to say, because the minor shifts are worth so little. In top condition, I'm sure this one would have sold for over $200.

eBay Gets Heavy-Handed with a Good Samaritan

In looking for more scofflaws selling the fake yellow seal 'errors,' I came across a seller offering more of them, but with a twist.

This seller, unlike the others offering yellow-seal pseudo-errors, was creating fake auctions. If you clicked on one of his auctions, you would see a lengthy note about the scam artists along with links educating people about other faked items on eBay.

I wrote him a note to thank him for keeping up the good effort. He wrote back to say that he appreciated my kind words, but he was going to have to stop his good work because eBay had threatened to cancel his account. In other words, the auction giant will allow dozens of people to be duped out of thousands of dollars on a weekly basis, but if a few nice people step up to take matters into their own hands, eBay gets uppity.

I'm sure there's a happy compromise.

Dealing with Faked Errors After the Fact

I'm annoyed with eBay because they don't seem to care at all when their sellers are auctioning off items that are sketchy or obviously fake. They make it difficult to contact them if you're not the seller or buyer (it took me ages to figure it out), and then all you get is a form letter saying that they'll look into it, which they obviously don't do, since the auctions are never pulled.

Even before contacting eBay, I'd already tried to contact the sellers. This proved futile, tho, because they invariably make excuses ("These bills just showed up in my shop"). I'm sure that most of them were lying to me, but I thought I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. Here is one message I got back from 'pickle4424' about a fake error he had up for auction: "no such a thing! it doesn't lose its color from the sun. never mind i sold it already!"

So I tried Plan C: I'd contact the buyers after the fact. Initially I wasn't sure how these notes would be received, but to my happy surprise, auction winners are happy to hear that what they've got is fake because eBay is pretty good about giving them recourse to fix things. They can get a refund from the seller or, if that fails, contact eBay and get results that way (eventually). I've received two notes back from cheated buyers, and both were highly complimentary and thankful.

My hope is that eventually the cheaters will get tired of having their goods returned to them and will give up selling fake items. In the meantime, I'll continue to pester them by alerting their unsuspecting buyers.

In case anyone else feels like joining the good Samaritan fun, all you have to do is to click on the seller's feedback number and scroll down to one of their completed auctions. Clicking on the auction takes you to another page where you can click on the member id of the winner. Then you simply send the winner a note explaining about the fakery.

Let's hope more people decide to go after these scoundrels.

Fake Errors

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people being duped out there. What makes matters worse is that the sellers are often guilty of fraud (that is, they're the ones creating these 'errors') or of simple greed (as when someone sells fake errors even after I've notified them that their notes aren't real errors). More annoying is that eBay simply doesn't care; I've alerted them on several occasions and have only received form-emails that led to nothing.

WRONG COLOR INK

Frankly, these errors just don't exist. The mint would not likely use the wrong ink by accident, and it certainly wouldn't happen repeatedly in different denominations and different series. I checked out the recent sales by coinsandnotesexpress, and nearly half of the 35 were bogus yellow seal errors netting the seller over $500. This is really just a case of buyer bestupid. If you can use the internet to buy bills on eBay, you can also research whether such bills can exist. The same seller also has some $2 bills with orange seals instead of red. What a coincidence!

MISCUTS


This error is so obvious that it's amazing anyone falls for it. Basically, if a bill is miscut in the exact same way on the front and back, it's simply been cut that way by someone who bought a sheet of notes (usually 32 notes, tho possibly a smaller group from the mint). These notes cost no more than about twice their nominal value, so you could get 24 such phonies from a 4x8 sheet of bills. For fake $1 bills, their actual value, then, is approximately $2. The note shown above has a buy-it-now price of $70 to go with the sob story of how the seller is forced to liquidate his stuff because of the recession.


Here is an 'error' that is truly impossible and which should have seemed suspicious to the six different people who bid on it. One way to tell it's fake is that its serial number starts with 99. That's because after 1981, the BEP started selling sheets of notes to the public, but those sheets only start with 984 and higher. Another clue is that this type of cutting is nothing like the way bills are really sliced by machines (not by hand, like this one). It has a circulated appearance, meaning only that the seller took it around in his pockets for a few days before putting it up for sale.

INSUFFICIENT INK on 2ND PRINTING

This is a type of error that really does occur, but there are also ways to fake it, as by using solvents and even micro-abrasion. I'm guessing that it's better to try this on a circulated note in order to mask the scuff marks, but that raises an important question: Who in their right mind would not notice such a striking bill and simply take it out of circulation? In other words, this error is highly unlikely except in excellent condition. I bought one such note on eBay but sent it back to the seller because it clearly had undergone some treatment; it just didn't feel right. It felt like an old shirt.

I think the seller turned around and tried selling it again, and he didn't do well in either case, so it hardly seems worth the effort. It's quite possible that he bought the note from someone and then, not knowing it was phony, tried to sell it on eBay.


The one above is a different note of this type of probably-fake error:
$1. Series 2003a. Condition: VF. 9 bids. $32.40. Date: 4/26/10


INSUFFICIENT INK on 3RD PRINTING

This one is probably a lot easier to fake, and spot, than the type mentioned above. In this case, the creator of the fake has simply caused the black overprint to appear under-inked. Since the district numbers are fully dark, there is little chance that this error is real. This particular $2 bill didn't find any takers for $49, and I'd like to think that this is because the error is so phony, but clearly that thinking is too simplistic. Most likely there is a threshold for intelligence that cuts off at a certain dollar value. For this type of error to fool someone, it would have had to be cheaper. I'm guessing it would have sold for $30. Above that amount, and the more savvy buyers are dissuaded because their gut tells them that the bill is no good and the naive buyers are dissuaded by the price.

OFFSETS

Offset errors are cool, but these days, thanks to color printers, they're a lot easier to fake. This one, however, is so patently obvious a fake that only a moron would be fooled by it. The thing is, there is no way that the supposed offset would be (a) forwards, rather than mirror image, (b) at that angle, and most importantly, (c) a different color ink. It doesn't help things that the same seller hornswoggled two other buyers with almost identical notes during the same week. He made over $200 with nothing more than $11 in currency, a photocopier, and some small auction fees.

$1. Series: 2008. Condition: XF. 1 bid. $77.37

3rd PRINT SHIFT


This error might be even more obvious than the fake offset errors above. What's so priceless about this one is how the little 12s are correctly situated while the black treasury seal is supposedly skewed way right. In fact, anyone can tell that the seal was erased (or scraped away); the seller then printed another one elsewhere on the bill.

R-1 to R-5: Digit Problems in the Serial Number

Call it what you will, a turned or rolling digit is pretty common. It looks like one of the serial number digits has sunk below or shot above the rest of the digits, generally by just a millimeter or two. Stuck digits occur when the wheel on the cylinder gets stuck, resulting in the appearance of just the top or bottom of a digit or, on occasion, an impression of parts of two consecutive digits.

Tho these errors can be quite common and unimpressive, to the point where they're often overlooked or ignored, some of them can look pretty cool. The cooler they look, the more they'll usually go for on the secondary market (on the primary market, they go at face value -- they're pieces of currency, after all!).

Rolling digits and letters don't seem to come up on eBay very often despite their relative commonness. In the past two weeks, there were only 4 auctions featuring the words 'digit' or 'rolling,' and only two of these auctions resulted in a sale (and one of those was to me!).


$1. Series: 1985. Condition: CU. Make-an-Offer. $63.95 (off of $82.95 asked). Date: 4/23/10.
This neat little error features a rolled letter F in the suffix. According to Bart's error book, it's worth about $100 since it's in perfect condition.

$2. Series 2003. Condition: CU. Make-an-Offer. $47.95. Date: 4/15/10.
The only thing appealing about this error is that it appears on a $2 note, so it's a bit rarer than such an error on a $1 note. Still, I don't think it's worth nearly $50 -- the error is just to subtle.

R-1 Through R-2 Error: Partial Offset (Backwards extra inking)

According to my research, all offset errors occur after a sheet of paper fails to enter the press; the ink intended for that sheet ends up on the impression cylinder instead and is then transfered onto the next 10-12 sheets, creating lighter impressions each time until the excess ink has virtually disappeared. Offset errors are mirror images of the other side of the bill, and there are both back-to-face (B2F) and face-to-back (F2B) errors. The mirror image of the 3rd printing (seals and serial numbers) can also show up on the backs of bills.

Partial offset errors occur when only some of the impression cylinder picks up the ink. These errors are extremely common, relatively speaking, and command only a small fraction of the price that their full-transfer brethren can sell for. Not surprisingly, the darker the impression, the more valuable the note. Some light, partial impressions are almost unnoticeable and are spent by an unsuspecting public many times before being pulled from circulation. I once received a $20 bill with a moderately dark F2B impression at the bank!

Faked versions of these errors have been showing up on eBay lately; they're pretty easy to detect if done poorly since they involve incorrect ink colors. Another clue that you're looking at a phony error: It's glaringly obvious but has somehow been spent many times. This doesn't mean it's fake, but it certainly merits consideration (and it probably is fake). You can also find notes listed as faux or novelty offset errors, tho why you'd want to is beyond me.

In the previous two weeks, there were 40 completed auctions for 'offset' errors; only 11 sold.




$1. Series: 1988a. Condition: XF. 21 bids. $130.50. Date: 4/26/10.
Light F2B offset, complete. According to Bart's book, this type of error is worth about $125. Had it been in perfect shape, it might have commanded another $75. Still, it's a neat error to own.

$1. Series: 1957. Condition: VF. 1 bid. $22.45. Date: 4/25/10.
Dark partial (very small) B2F offset, worth about what the winner paid for it. Not too exciting.


$1. Series: 1993. Condition: VF+. 2 bids. $14. Date: 4/25/10.
B2F offset, moderate in size (1-2 inches) but light. Similar to the one above, but even more boring because the transfer was so light. Not worth reproducing here.





$2. Series: 1976. Condition: AU (58). Best-Offer. $77.95. Date: 4/25/10.
B2F offset, moderate. Very light. Totally uninteresting to me, but probably worth the price because of its relative rarity (since it's on a $2) and condition. There is no way I'd have spent the money on this bill; better to wait till something better comes along and spent a bit more for it. This one is so insignificant that you would pretty much have to point it out to someone in order for them to notice it. Offset errors are like jokes. If you have to explain it, it's not worth the effort.

$1. 1935e*. Condition: F-VF. 4 bids. $5.20. Date: 4/23/10.
Supposedly this note had a light F2B offset transfer. I couldn't see it in the scans. Essentially it looked like a perfectly normal circulated bill with maybe a bit of schmutz on the back. Why anyone would buy this one is beyond me. Not worth reproducing.


$1. 1935e. Condition: F-VF. 1 bid. $53.98. 4/22/10.
Here is the worst deal of the fortnight. This highly circulated note features a partial B2F error, fairly dark. It's not as bad as the nearly invisible offset mentioned above, but it was ten times the price.


$5. Series: 1977. Condition: F-VF. 1 bid. $22.50. Date: 4/18/10
Another low-quality tiny F2B offset error. Dull, dull, dull, but not overpriced -- just not my cuppa. A good note for a person of limited means who wants to collect errors. At least the offset was quite dark.


$1. Series 1988a. Condition: Unc. 25 bids! $54.95. Date: 4/17/10
This was the good deal of the fortnight: a pretty-dark complete transfer onto the face of a note in perfect condition. Price guides list this with a value of about $250. It's a striking error. Well done, buyer. Compare this with the pathetic 1935e note above and see what a good eBayer can find!


$5. Series: 1985. Condition: XF+. 15 bids. $36. Date: 4/17/10.
Another decent deal. This is a minor B2F transfer, but the offset is dark and quite obvious despite its smallish size.



$1. Series: 1935e. Condition: Unc. 1 bid. $62.45. Date: 4/17/10.
Again, a smallish transfer, but in this case the age of the note and the darkness of the offset make it a good deal.

$1. Series 1969b*. Condition: Unc. 1 bid. $204.94. Date: 4/14/10
A bit pricy, but maybe it's worth it. Here's a large partial offset of the front onto the back. Ramping up the value is that it's a fairly old bill and that it was a replacement (star) note. I'd estimate its value at about $300, so a good deal to the buyer.

R-1 Through R-5 Error: Ink Smears

Ink smears, according to Frederick Bart, are among the most common errors around. He estimates that a minor smear will show up as often as once every thousand notes. The problem with pricing these notes is that even tho major obverse ink smears are fairly rare (up to R-5), they don't have the appeal of many other errors. To me, they look more like bad mistakes than something fluky that went wrong at the mint. Worse is the fact that they can be faked (and often are).

Over the past two weeks, ending yesterday, eBay shows 23 recent ink smear auctions and only 6 of them sold. Here they are:


$5. Series: 1985. Condition: VF+. 3 bids. $30.55. Date: 4/25/10.


$1. Series: 1974. Condition: CU (64). 1 bid. $106.45. Date: 4/25/10. Full disclosure: I'm the one who bought this note. According to Bart's price guide, this note is worth at least $150. Interestingly, Bart's company is the one who put this note up for sale on eBay. Thanks, Fred!


$1. Series: 2006. Condition: VF+. 1 bid. $7.99. Date: 4/25/10. This barely qualifies as an error and certainly doesn't qualify as interesting to me. I'd have spent it. OK, no, I'd have given it to one of my students.


$2. Series: 1963. Condition: AU+. 4 bids. $10.45. Date: 4/23/10. This is about as minor as an ink smear can be; apparently the red ink on the portrait is from the red overprint (of the serial numbers). I'm not sure I believe this: The red of the smear doesn't seem to match the red of the serial numbers.


$1. Series: 2006. Condition: AU+. Date: 4/17/10. It's worth noting that two auctions featuring a very minor overprint smear did not succeed even for $24.50. It just looks too boring to be interesting to collectors. An almost identical note did find a buyer for $10.99 with one bidder.


$1. Series: 2006. Condition: AU+. Date: 4/17/10. 3 bids. $9.25.

Part of the problem is that sellers were asking too much on Buy-It-Now and Best-Offer auctions. But really, the main point is that for the most part, this sort of error is simply not very interesting to collectors (including me).