I would like to bring up the ongoing problem of hobo nickel cast coins that have been appearing on eBay. These are a problem from several perspectives. First, these are original designs stolenfrom the carvers that originally made them and can mean a loss of revenue for the carvers. Some people (maybe not members of our club) buy the castings because they cost pennies on the dollarcompared to the original labor intensive carvings. Copies may even go as far as diluting the value of the original art. We have discussed the issue on our OHNS Facebook page ever since the first onesstarted showing up. China, who does not have copyright laws, has been the culprit in creating the copies. If you are an artist that has been copied, you can file a Vero report with eBay to try tohave a listing pulled. It is a constant ongoing battle as one seller may get shut down; another one can pop up at any time.

While these copies are a plague for the original artists, it can also affect buyers when sellers do not disclose that they are copies. This happened in the beginning when the copies first hit themarket. The copies were identified and posted on OHNS Facebook in order to immediately get the word out. As a result, multiple complaints went into eBay from our Facebook members and sellers wereshutdown. We stayed vigilant about that and sellers soon realized that they would have to list these as copies, casings, tokens, fantasy issues, or the like. That worked well to keep buyers fromgetting scammed.

Unfortunately there was a recent instance of a seller from the U.S. that had some of these copies mixed in with other listings of real hobo nickels. This might have been a collection bought secondhand and the seller was not expert enough on the subject to know what they owned. While many collectors of hobo nickels have become familiar with the look of the Chinese copies, some of these copiesin this sellers group looked very real. And on top of that when the original artist notified the seller that they were counterfeit copies, the seller did not cancel the listings and eBay acted tooslowly to pull the listings with copies then selling in the $175 range. Your safest bet is to buy directly from the artist or a seller you know well (preferably an OHNS member). OHNS can helparbitrate in a financial dealing gone wrong if both parties are club members. Remember the code of ethics that OHNS has members agree to and must abide by.

One other issue with these copies, even when listed correctly, is that they clog the search engine when one wants to find "real" hobo nickels and not wade through a bunch of junk!

For more information on the Original Hobo Nickel Society, Inc, see:
http://www.hobonickels.org/