Comment by 101008 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 101008 | Hacker News Reader

What happens when a buyer disputes a counterfeit item with their "message" and the seller doesn't agree? It may be easy to differentiate with counterfeit shoes, but what happens with art pieces, books, collectors' items in general?

(My experience: I collect Harry Potter books. Signed copies were always faked, because it is "easy" to forge a signature. But lately I've been seen fake first printings. Some people buy 2nd or 3rd printings (way cheaper) and change the page with the bibliographical details, which is hard to spot. Other ones even printed the whole book, those are a bit easy to spot because a 25 years old book shouldn't look as new, but if you buy it online seeing only photos, you may get scammed after paying thousdans of dollars)

> It may be easy to differentiate with counterfeit shoes, but what happens with art pieces, books, collectors' items in general?

We don't do art or books, but we do some collectors' items

> What happens when a buyer disputes a counterfeit item with their "message" and the seller doesn't agree?

We ourselves can help if the customer paid via paypal/credit card — we've got the service mentioned in the article, which gets people's money back with 99.9% success rate, which we also guarantee it (so if it doesn't get your money back from the bank or from PayPal, we refund the $60 you paid us)

But yes — if you've been scammed by a malevolent seller, they might even believe the 'message' (they themselves know the item is fake anyway) and not care to do anyhting

Thank you for answering!

First edition Harry Potter books are worth thousands of dollars?!? I’m assuming that’s only in mint condition but wow.

First edition first volume was a much smaller print run than subsequent volumes.

So if I bought the first day it was available, that’s not necessarily first edition?

In the UK, it probably is. But it was relatively unknown at the time, so it would be surprising if you had.

First edition first printing of Harry Potter 1 from the UK was only 500 copies in hardback. That one fetched a recent record of 190.000 dollars. Paperback is expensive as well, from ranges between 2k and 10k.

Hardback US first printing is around 1k/2k too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com