Joined: Sun Aug 21, 2016 7:39 am Posts: 228 Location: Long Island NY, USA
Hans Durstling wrote:
Seems to me that all of use whose interest in gems is in some way known to the public will have gotten these calls - "I got in in Afghanistan, " "I bought it from a local guy in the Cayman Islands." Stuff like that. It's like a certificate from hell: "I got it on a cruise" is all you need to know it will be garbage.
So your heart sinks when you get such a call; you know what is coming. The most, I suppose you could call it "crass", one to come my way came from a young and obviously poor woman at a gem show some years ago. She said, (and these were her exact words) "If this is what I think it is I think I'm rich. Is this a star sapphire?" She handed me one of those weird and stupid man made blue cabochons with a six pointed star carved into the bottom. No; not a star sapphire; no, not rich. And I had to tell her this and watch her hopes crumble before my eyes.
"I got this in the Cayman Islands," was another memorable one. The guy, again obviously not wealthy, had met some local people who had sold him black coral, God knows for what price, together with a long story to the effect that the stuff had vastly increased in value, was still going up by the day, and if he couldn't sell it when he got back home they would happily buy it back for the same price he had paid them. When I told him approximately what it was really worth I thought he was going to cry right there in front of me.
The combination of greed and stupidity is not usually one that gets my sympathy, but these were such little people. For one time in their scant and stinted lives they had stood at the threshold of a fairy tale. And I had to shatter it for them. It isn't fun.
Cheers all, Hans Durstling Moncton, Canada
Sounds like these victims were buying *dreams* and *hope*. That's what the con artists were exploiting, probably what they always exploit in going after such people, eg, Ponzi schemes and so forth.
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