Fake moldavites – how many are being sold?

I wondered how many fake moldavites were being sold and at what price, or in other words, just how many buyers are being scammed.

Because of its popularity and the accessibility of usable analytical tools, I decided to turn to eBay. To be sure, I selected only those sellers who were selling very obvious knock-offs.

Analysis tool for eBay

MyStoreAnalyst.com - Sales of a sellerThere are many analytical tools to be used with eBay.  The most well-known is probably Terapeak. It contains data about all sellers and items being sold. Terapeak has one disadvantage however: it makes data anonymous. It is therefore impossible to select one specific seller and see the number of items up for sale and at what price they are being sold.

For my analysis, I chose MyStoreAnalyst. This analytical tool enables its users to take a closer look at any specific seller and view specific information about individual items sold and unsold (with the option of filtering). It therefore becomes possible to find out any eBay seller’s turnover and amount of items sold.

What I included in my analysis

I was mostly interested in rough, not cut ‘moldavites’ and those set raw in jewelry. I left out the cut ones, where the situation would have been even worse, given the fact that most polished moldavites on offer are in fact fakes (source).

eBay offers some real gems (I speak sarcastically). My amusement reached an all time high when seeing there were even multi-color moldavites up for sale – and in all colors of the rainbow! You can buy a blue moldavite, a red one, there are even yellow ones and turquoise ones. What colors do real moldavites come in?

To be honest however, real moldavites are also to be found on eBay. Article on basic overview of the moldavites being sold on eBay, one of my past publishings.

Step-by-step analysis

  1. Research on eBay, selection of sellers offering fake moldavites
    (literally cheap pieces of glass)
  2. Adding these sellers to Mystoreanalyst
    Analysis of past sales (90 days back) and monitoring of active items for the duration of one month. That is, data from May 7 to September 7, 2018. Filtering of analysis (of items – only ‘moldavites’) on Mystoreanalyst
  3. Creation of results chart

How much data had I analyzed?

  • 21 sellers who are selling fake moldavites (list of sellers with links is shown in the chart below)
  • 1,966 items – fake moldavites

Final results?

20 sellers have sold 1,033 fake moldavites in total.  The total value of these knock-off sales was $20,172.00!

That equals about a thousand scammed buyers that purchased a fake moldavite with no value.

While looking at the ratings of these scamming sellers, I noticed most of them had over 98% positive feedback from their buyers. It can therefore be assumed that most of those who had purchased these fakes have to this day no idea! That’s very sad to say the least.

These analyzed sellers are also selling other minerals. I had not inspected these, but I am sure some will also definitely be fakes.

Final document with overview of individual sellers.

My recommendation

Caveat emptor! That is, buyers beware and purchase moldavites from reliable sellers only. Learn how to differentiate between fakes and the real deal…

One thought on “Fake moldavites – how many are being sold?

Leave a Reply