Interesting thread on reddit about Roma Numismatics and the apparent arrest of Richard Beale

[Tetradogma]

4 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

Some new information can be found in these two Greek articles. I'll summarise some bits from a translation I'm reading but otherwise you'll need to use Google Translate (unless you know Greek) to read the whole article:

https://www.kathimerini.gr/society/562335169/archaiokapilia-to-thriler-me-to-chryso-nomisma-toy-vroytoy/

https://www.kathimerini.gr/society/562294195/oi-archaiokapiloi-poy-den-vrethikan-sto-edolio/

• Roma was potentially a subject of a 2016 Greek investigation into an antiquities looting ring in Patras, where 47 defendants were referred for prosecution two years later but none from international auction houses
• "The relevant documents analyze the route of ancient objects (mainly coins) from their illegal excavation to their sale, the suspicious role of foreign auction houses in laundering antiquities, as well as techniques for manipulating electronic auctions with virtual 'hits'." [my note: perhaps 'hits' here is a bad translation of 'bids'?]
• A Corinth stater sold by Roma in 2016 was part of this investigation and supposedly a phone call was recorded of one of the defendants discussing this coin specifically.
• The Corinth stater appears to be this one. The 1920s provenance is argued to be false.
• An additional 27 coins likely minted in Greece were sold by Roma between September-October of 2016 with the same "G.J.P. Collection" provenance that the Corinth stater had. No other coins have been sold by Roma with this provenance since then.
• The trial has been postponed for some time, set to resume again in June of this year
• As part of the investigation, 2,024 coins have been confiscated, either including or in addition to 600 that had been exported to Munich and repatriated.
• A coin from Delphi sold by Nomos in May 2016 for 15,000 CHF was allegedly looted from Karpenisi just 3 months earlier.
• A recorded conversation of one of the defendants claimed that about half of the auction house's 20% fee is used for obtaining false CoAs.
• The investigation also alleges that auction houses encourage their Greek contacts to bid on their own coins to drive up the prices
• If the shill bidder wins, the auction house "awards" them the lot anyway, at no cost, and the shill bidder then can simply re-offer the coin later at another auction house with a more legitimate-looking "collection history"
• Such a practice would completely invalidate the purpose of the requirement some auction houses have of never auctioning off coins that don't have a previous auction or collection history [e.g. Nomos was quoted as saying this in the BBC documentary on the dekadrachms].
• As many as 8 persons that are either owners, managers, or contacts of international auction houses have been named in the investigation but no charges will be brought against them due to insufficient evidence. 

Hi - I have quote posted this of an FB Ancient Coins group and credited you and your summary - Please let me know if thats not ok. I think its a really good summary, most people won't bother to translate/read the article but I think its important people see this.

 

[IanG]

John Conduitt and Simon W, I do understand the points that you are making but my issue is with the lack of transparency about process. If an auction house wants to run an auction with a reserve, fine - but disclose it. If it wants to bid in its own auction, fine - but disclose it. LAC's terms and conditions for the auction that I mentioned do not give them those rights, they are silent on those matters. Here in the UK there is a set of T&Cs generally used for property auctions called the Common Auction Conditions. They specifically state that a lot may be subject to a reserve price and if that price isn't met, the lot may be withdrawn and they also state that a seller can bid in its own auction up to the reserve price, but not beyond it. A buyer has to accept those conditions before joining the auction. Everyone knows where they then stand. The line between illegal shill bidding and legal 'off the wall' bidding is precisely drawn. But many of the online coin auctions have basic conditions which don't touch upon these or other potentially important matters at all. Then the whole process is opaque, and that creates the environment in which manipulation is more likely to take place. 

[Kaleun96]

Just now, IanG said:

John Conduitt and Simon W, I do understand the points that you are making but my issue is with the lack of transparency about process. If an auction house wants to run an auction with a reserve, fine - but disclose it. If it wants to bid in its own auction, fine - but disclose it. LAC's terms and conditions for the auction that I mentioned do not give them those rights, they are silent on those matters. Here in the UK there is a set of T&Cs generally used for property auctions called the Common Auction Conditions. They specifically state that a lot may be subject to a reserve price and if that price isn't met, the lot may be withdrawn and they also state that a seller can bid in its own auction up to the reserve price, but not beyond it. A buyer has to accept those conditions before joining the auction. Everyone knows where they then stand. The line between illegal shill bidding and legal 'off the wall' bidding is precisely drawn. But many of the online coin auctions have basic conditions which don't touch upon these or other potentially important matters at all. Then the whole process is opaque, and that creates the environment in which manipulation is more likely to take place. 

Couldn't agree more. There is zero transparency when auction houses like Naumann frequently bid on their own lots to win them back and prevent them going for too low of a price.

I think we'd all be pretty suspicious if we had placed a max bid of, say, $2200 and were able to see that the only bidder bidding us up from $1500 to $2200 was the auction house themselves. Perhaps their "hidden reserve" was $2000 so they'd stop bidding at that point and you'd end up winning. Since the "hidden reserve" isn't disclosed, it would look exactly like shill bidding.

[JimBranson]

5 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

The relevant documents analyze the route of ancient objects (mainly coins) from their illegal excavation to their sale, the suspicious role of foreign auction houses in laundering antiquities, as well as techniques for manipulating electronic auctions with virtual 'hits'." [my note: perhaps 'hits' here is a bad translation of 'bids'?]

 

5 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

• A recorded conversation of one of the defendants claimed that about half of the auction house's 20% fee is used for obtaining false CoAs.
• The investigation also alleges that auction houses encourage their Greek contacts to bid on their own coins to drive up the prices
• If the shill bidder wins, the auction house "awards" them the lot anyway, at no cost, and the shill bidder then can simply re-offer the coin later at another auction house with a more legitimate-looking "collection history"

I was scoping out the Roma Numismatics feature and spotted something hella odd. Was gonna bid on a coin hoping that Beale news would keep the hammers low but I still couldnt keep up. But then when the live auction started and the coin went for even less than the prebid! Was still out (damn) but had never seen anything like this. Roma's website is a dumpster fire and the data is visible in the browser during live so I checked what happened. It turns out thats exactly what went down. Some dude bid 3200 and the actual hammer during live was 3000 by another dude and the bidding even started somewhere under 3000 so neither the original 3000 or 3200 applied (or even anything after starting?). If I was the seller I'd be flipping my lid. Makes me wonder if any other coins went for less than expected? The auction paused several times so did more bids fail to apply or what was that about?

 Well! I investigated and it seems that something similar happened with several coins! Coin mentioned earlier was number 72. Coin 13 had a prebid of 1700 by one dude and sold for 1300 to another. Coin 20 has a prebid of 1800 by one dude and sold for 900 to another. Think some dozen+ prebids mightve been taken over by lower floor bids as well but not sure about that. Wtf?

Attached is info for coin 20 as an example with parts of the ids censored.

[Kaleun96]

21 minutes ago, JimBranson said:

I was scoping out the Roma Numismatics feature and spotted something hella odd. Was gonna bid on a coin hoping that Beale news would keep the hammers low but I still couldnt keep up. But then when the live auction started and the coin went for even less than the prebid! Was still out (damn) but had never seen anything like this. Roma's website is a dumpster fire and the data is visible in the browser during live so I checked what happened. It turns out thats exactly what went down. Some dude bid 3200 and the actual hammer during live was 3000 by another dude and the bidding even started somewhere under 3000 so neither the original 3000 or 3200 applied (or even anything after starting?). If I was the seller I'd be flipping my lid. Makes me wonder if any other coins went for less than expected? The auction paused several times so did more bids fail to apply or what was that about?

 Well! I investigated and it seems that something similar happened with several coins! Coin mentioned earlier was number 72. Coin 13 had a prebid of 1700 by one dude and sold for 1300 to another. Coin 20 has a prebid of 1800 by one dude and sold for 900 to another. Think some dozen+ prebids mightve been taken over by lower floor bids as well but not sure about that. Wtf?

Attached is info for coin 20 as an example with parts of the ids censored.

Not entirely sure what these fields mean but in the context of what you're saying I'm assuming:

• bs_hammer = hammer price
• buyer_user_id = user who won the lot
• highest_bidded_amount = the max bid, or max prebid?
• highest_bidded_user_id = user who placed the highest bid, which I assume is normally the same as buyer_user_id?

So are you saying that user_1 (id: xx39) won the lot for 900 GBP even though user_2 (id: xx94) supposedly had placed a max bid of 1800 GBP? That does seem very odd if so. I wonder how that could happen? Normally you might suspect some issue with the syncing of bids across multiple platforms but if you're saying this data was available somewhere during the live auction on Roma's site, it would indicate Roma had all the necessary bid data, right?

 

edit: does seem the hammer was 900 GBP, i.e. what the bs_hammer field has

Edited March 24, 2023 by Kaleun96

[Ryro]

4 hours ago, IanG said:

Part of Kaleun96's very interesting post above refers to the manipulation of electronic auctions. In this respect I encountered something suspicious at a London Ancient Coins auction a few weeks ago. I bid and lost on 2 lots. In fairness my bid on the first, a Sicilian bronze from Himera as Thermai Himerensis, was a lowball marker that I decided not to pursue in favour of other targets. The price realised for that coin was £28. On the second lot, a bronze from Perrhaiboi in Thessaly, I bid £44 and lost out to a bid for £46. What is odd is that both of those coins are now available on the London Ancient Coins VCoins site for prices that are very substantially higher than the auction hammer prices - the Sicilian coin is on for £300, the Thessalian for £140. Which strongly suggests that LAC or someone acting as a proxy for them bid on LAC's own auction to prevent the coins going for what LAC considered too low a price. I'm not sure that it would be completely accurate to describe that as shill bidding because in neither case did the winning 'Bidder 1', presumably LAC or their proxy, intervene in the auction to drive up the price; their one and only bid was the final one to prevent the coin being won by a third party. But it does leave a bad taste. I have no problems with an auction house setting a transparent reserve and indeed many houses do just that by having a robust starting price. But here there was a low starting price and I would have won the Perrhaiboi coin fair and square had - as appears to be the case - LAC not intervened in their own auction to enforce a secret reserve. I wonder how much of this stuff goes on elsewhere.

I have a friend who has auctions on biddr and the sellers can see your pre bids. 

I can't say this enough, pre bidding is for suckers. Don't do it at all costs. 

[JimBranson]

30 minutes ago, Kaleun96 said:

So are you saying that user_1 (id: xx39) won the lot for 900 GBP even though user_2 (id: xx94) supposedly had placed a max bid of 1800 GBP? That does seem very odd if so. I wonder how that could happen?

Yes. There is somesort of problem with carrying prebids over…multiple lots of coins oijs worth thousands of dollars had pre bids placed and accepted….on the day of the auction, prebids were not even used and the coins were sold from the starting price up. 

[JimBranson]

Beyond the unfortunate erasure of bids for the collector, it really is the consigner who is mist affected. Here, presumably thousands were lost depending on the extent of the issue

[Hesiod]

18 minutes ago, Ryro said:

the sellers can see your pre bids. 

do you know if they can see proxy bids? Time to never prebid on biddr again

[TheTrachyEnjoyer]

18 minutes ago, Ryro said:

I have a friend who has auctions on biddr and the sellers can see your pre bids. 

I can't say this enough, pre bidding is for suckers. Don't do it at all costs. 

Wow

[zadie]

26 minutes ago, Ryro said:

I have a friend who has auctions on biddr and the sellers can see your pre bids. 

I can't say this enough, pre bidding is for suckers. Don't do it at all costs. 

This should surprise exactly no one and is common practice for every single auction house that you bid with

[SimonW]

7 minutes ago, zadie said:

This should surprise exactly no one and is common practice for every single auction house that you bid with

Exactly. Pre bids are an equivalent to the old mail bids and are always transfered and visible to the auction house. Here's a short excerpt from the "What is a pre bid?" link just below the bidding field on biddr:

After submission, a pre bid is forwarded to the corresponding auction house. The auction house can either accept or reject the pre bid. If the auction house accepts the pre bid, it will be carried out by the auction house on behalf of the bidder during the auction.

In case of an online auction that takes place on biddr.com and for which pre bidding is public, the pre bid is carried out automatically and step by step against other bidders by our system. The amount of the bid remains a secret until it is reached and is only known to the auction house.

 

Proxy bids on the other hand:

After submission, a proxy bid is safely stored in biddr.com's system and is executed step by step against other bidders during the live bidding process as if the bidder were bidding themselves. The amount of the bid remains a secret and, unlike a pre bid, will not be transmitted to the auction house in advance.

For this reason, a proxy bid does not have temporal priority over other bids and it may happen that the proxy bidder is not the winning bidder, if the maximum bid has been reached and was first bid by a competing bidder due to the alternating execution of a proxy bid.

For example: If the proxy bid is 300 EUR, the auction lot opens at 260 EUR and the bidding steps are 20 EUR, the system will bid 280 EUR for the proxy bidder. If another bidder placed a bid of 300 EUR, the maximum amount of the proxy bid would be reached and the system could not bid any more. The competing bidder would win the lot.

If a proxy bid is successful, it is subject to the same auction terms as a normal live bid. The auction terms of the corresponding auction house apply.

Edited March 24, 2023 by SimonW

[shanxi]

5 minutes ago, SimonW said:

Pre bids are visible to the auction house

And that is also the problem. I just had it the day before yesterday. I couldn't attend the live auction and placed a high pre-bid and surprise surprise the hammer price was exactly that pre-bid.

Not that I didn't expect it, but if you want a coin badly enough and there is no proxy bid option you have no choice. However, I am much more cautious than with proxy bids.
 

[SimonW]

With a pre bid you basically choose the auction house to bid on your behalf. There's no other way than to disclose your bid to them. One solution is to choose someone else to bid on your behalf, if you can't participate live. Many dealers are offering this service for a few %.

Edited March 24, 2023 by SimonW

[Hesiod]

Just now, SimonW said:

There's no other way than to disclose your bid with them.

This makes sense when the auction isn't being run on biddr, but in the case where the auction is I don't see how this is the case (as the system auto applies the bids anyway!)

[Väinämöinen]

1 hour ago, JimBranson said:

...

This sounds big, but I'm not yet sure of the implications.

[El Cazador]

27 minutes ago, zadie said:

This should surprise exactly no one and is common practice for every single auction house that you bid with

How come?

[John Conduitt]

31 minutes ago, zadie said:

This should surprise exactly no one and is common practice for every single auction house that you bid with

This is the point of a pre-bid (and why proxy bids exist). It's only a problem when you can't trust the auction house. That has suddenly become all but impossible in light of Mr Beale's actions.

[zadie]

1 minute ago, El Cazador said:

How come?

How come auction houses can see pre-bids? They need to know of them in advance in order to execute them. This is exactly why a mechanism such as proxy-bidding exists

[DonnaML]

1 hour ago, JimBranson said:

Yes. There is somesort of problem with carrying prebids over…multiple lots of coins oijs worth thousands of dollars had pre bids placed and accepted….on the day of the auction, prebids were not even used and the coins were sold from the starting price up. 

If you're talking about the most recent Roma auction, that can't be entirely true, because I submitted pre-bids on three coins and won all of them, at less than my maximum bids.

[DonnaML]

7 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

• A Corinth stater sold by Roma in 2016 was part of this investigation and supposedly a phone call was recorded of one of the defendants discussing this coin specifically.
• The Corinth stater appears to be this one. The 1920s provenance is argued to be false.
• An additional 27 coins likely minted in Greece were sold by Roma between September-October of 2016 with the same "G.J.P. Collection" provenance that the Corinth stater had. No other coins have been sold by Roma with this provenance since then.
•  

Speaking of Roma provenances using initials, I raised this question in another thread last night, but thought I'd ask it again here: does anyone know if the "collection of ZP, Austria," a name used by Roma to sell quite a few coins in the last couple of years -- including a Roman Republican coin I purchased -- is a real collection of a real person, as opposed to a fictional provenance? 

[Väinämöinen]

12 minutes ago, DonnaML said:

If you're talking about the most recent Roma auction, that can't be entirely true, because I submitted pre-bids on three coins and won all of them, at less than my maximum bids.

Looking at the post earlier it seems that some person pre-bid 1800 and a different person won the coin at 900. Apparently the same happened on a different coin where the pre-bid was 1700 and the coin sold for 1300. If true, that has some curious implications for the consigners and I wouldn't be happy. Third coin coin mentioned started at below the initial leading pre-bid and sold for less than the initial leading pre-bid.

[Kaleun96]

9 minutes ago, DonnaML said:

Speaking of Roma provenances using initials, I raised this question in another thread last night, but thought I'd ask it again here: does anyone know if the "collection of ZP, Austria," a name used by Roma to sell quite a few coins in the last couple of years -- including a Roman Republican coin I purchased -- is a real collection of a real person, as opposed to a fictional provenance? 

It's been mentioned in this thread recently that ZP is a dealer under the name "Zeno Pop", which brings up some relevant results on google under the search "Zeno Pop Numismatics".

 

Edited March 24, 2023 by Kaleun96

[Dwarf]

It is not a dealer under the name of Zeno Pop - but Zeno Pop himself
You could usually find him at most coin shows in Germany and around until a few years ago

[DonnaML]

7 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

Some new information can be found in these two Greek articles. I'll summarise some bits from a translation I'm reading but otherwise you'll need to use Google Translate (unless you know Greek) to read the whole article:

https://www.kathimerini.gr/society/562335169/archaiokapilia-to-thriler-me-to-chryso-nomisma-toy-vroytoy/

https://www.kathimerini.gr/society/562294195/oi-archaiokapiloi-poy-den-vrethikan-sto-edolio/

• Roma was potentially a subject of a 2016 Greek investigation into an antiquities looting ring in Patras, where 47 defendants were referred for prosecution two years later but none from international auction houses
• "The relevant documents analyze the route of ancient objects (mainly coins) from their illegal excavation to their sale, the suspicious role of foreign auction houses in laundering antiquities, as well as techniques for manipulating electronic auctions with virtual 'hits'." [my note: perhaps 'hits' here is a bad translation of 'bids'?]
• A Corinth stater sold by Roma in 2016 was part of this investigation and supposedly a phone call was recorded of one of the defendants discussing this coin specifically.
• The Corinth stater appears to be this one. The 1920s provenance is argued to be false.
• An additional 27 coins likely minted in Greece were sold by Roma between September-October of 2016 with the same "G.J.P. Collection" provenance that the Corinth stater had. No other coins have been sold by Roma with this provenance since then.
• The trial has been postponed for some time, set to resume again in June of this year
• As part of the investigation, 2,024 coins have been confiscated, either including or in addition to 600 that had been exported to Munich and repatriated.
• A coin from Delphi sold by Nomos in May 2016 for 15,000 CHF was allegedly looted from Karpenisi just 3 months earlier.
• A recorded conversation of one of the defendants claimed that about half of the auction house's 20% fee is used for obtaining false CoAs.
• The investigation also alleges that auction houses encourage their Greek contacts to bid on their own coins to drive up the prices
• If the shill bidder wins, the auction house "awards" them the lot anyway, at no cost, and the shill bidder then can simply re-offer the coin later at another auction house with a more legitimate-looking "collection history"
• Such a practice would completely invalidate the purpose of the requirement some auction houses have of never auctioning off coins that don't have a previous auction or collection history [e.g. Nomos was quoted as saying this in the BBC documentary on the dekadrachms].
• As many as 8 persons that are either owners, managers, or contacts of international auction houses have been named in the investigation but no charges will be brought against them due to insufficient evidence. 

What I find most amazing about these articles is that it's been seven years since these defendants were charged, and the trial still hasn't taken place! I guess the wheels of Greek justice turn slowly.

Most of the information in these articles is actually about this old case. There's very little new information about the Eid Mar or the case in New York against Roma; most of the information about that case is taken from the Art News article. There's really more about Nomos than about Roma.

The one "new" fact I saw that's directly relevant to the current case, if I am reading the articles correctly, is that the import documents for the Eid Mar aureus apparently stated that it was originally exported from Turkey. Which seems inconsistent with the supposed 19th century Swiss provenance. And if the statement of origin wasn't a complete fabrication, it makes me wonder why Turkey didn't try to claim the Eid Mar -- assuming that it was even notified. Either there's real evidence that the coin was dug up in Greece, or everyone is just blithely assuming that if it was minted in Greece, that's where it was found. I find the latter hard to believe. The people at the New York City DA's office and in charge of this matter for the Greek government may not be experts on Roman numismatics, but I doubt that they're that ignorant of the international nature of Roman coinage. Or the obvious possibility that regardless of where the Eid Mar was minted, its original owner or a subsequent owner could have taken it anywhere in the Roman world and buried it there. So I'll be surprised if it doesn't turn out that there actually is evidence that the coin was excavated in Greece.