My husband and I saw an ad for U. S Coin Exchange in World magazine. We wanted to invest in gold and decided to contact this company. We were connected to Armand De Angelis who owns U.S. Coin Exchange and he claimed that his coins were graded by an independent grading service. He also claimed that we could sell back to him whenever we wanted although he encouraged people to wait for him to tell them to sell. We bought our gold on March 13 with a credit card. We had paid $4419.00 for the following:
A set of four gold Indian head coins dated:
$2.50—1926
$5.00—1909
$10.00-1932
$20.00-1924
These are all in plastic and uncirculated. They were graded by TCGS (Twenty-first Century Grading Service), which we found out later to be the company Armand DeAngelis uses for all of his grading although his literature says that he uses PCGS, NGC, ANACS, TCGS, ICG, SEGS, Hallmark or INS. All four of our coins were graded to be MS64.
At the time of the sale, Armand De Angelis told us that we would be receiving quarterly updates as to the value of our gold. When we never received the updates, we contacted him and he said that they were in the mail. They never arrived, so we called a few more times. Eventually, he gave us the ICG website (www.coinclub.com/prices) and said that we could find our gold prices under the NumisMedia prices. We monitored our coin prices and decided we wanted to sell our coins in January. According to the website given to us by Armand, our MS64 coins would have a value of around $6000.
We contacted Mr.De Angelis and he offered us $1100 for our set. When I asked about the discrepancy, he claimed that he would only pay us the wholesale price. He said that is how all gold brokers do business. A customer buys from them at retail price but sells back at the wholesale price. This did not make sense to me, why would anyone invest in coins if this were the case?
We then decided to see if we could sell our set of coins to a dealer here in our town. We took it to 3 different places and all of these coin shops said that our coins were most likely MS62 and MS63 at the most. The most anyone offered us for the coins was $2500.
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