BEWARE of fake 925 Sterling Silver claim

[melbourneclearance]

I see a huge amount of sellers on ebay claiming that the items they are selling are 925 sterling silver, yet the items cost less than $10 to buy.

925 Sterlng Silver jewellery is expensive, I would even be very suspicious of items priced at $20. Anything under $10 is almost definitely a fake. I realise that some of these sellers don't even have a clue that they are selling fakes. Although, c'mon, after the first 10 complaints you'd have thought they're getting the hint.

At the time of writing this, 1 gram of 925 sterling silver melt value is USD 0.47. That's 62 cents Aussie a gram, and sterling silver items are usually quite heavy.

I know that some Chinese items have a hallmark on them, most notably on chains. Real simple 925 sterling silver chains can cost more than $50, not $1. No matter how cheap the labourers are, no one can make a real 925 sterling silver at $1. These are definitely fakes.

I also see some sellers described their items as "925 Sterling Silver plated". 925 sterling silver means it is pure (or as pure as it gets - 92.5% silver), you cannot have something called "925 sterling silver plated". Their items are just silver plated.

When will ebay take a stand on obvious fakes like this? It is hurting the consumers and the marketplace and can only hurt ebay's reputation.

[gutterpunkz05]

 So where does your fake claim come from.  925 or sterling silver is cheap  and it is nowhere near pure.  925 = 92.5%.  It is commonly used for cheap jewellry.  your price per gram is probably right, could not be bothered doing the maths.  but for example a ring  will weigh less than 5 grams.  Silver and gold plating is extremely common  and the grade of plating can vary but mostly

nowadays is 999.  There are millions of fakes out there  but  cheap/925/plated etc does not mean fake.

[melbourneclearance]

I already said in my post that 925 is 92.5%. And that 925 sterling silver items are usually quite heavy. A 5g 925 ring is quite hard to find.

Let's assume you can find a 5g 925 ring, just the silver costs $3, someone needs to design it, someone needs to make it, someone needs to wholesale it, assuming no more middle men, someone needs to retail it. You reckon you can get that lightweight ring for $10 retail?

We are not talking about plated silver here, I already mentioned this in my original post. Plating is cheap and is used for cheap stuff. I am talking about 925 sterling silver.

[digital*ghost]

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@melbourneclearance wrote:

When will ebay take a stand on obvious fakes like this?

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Judging purely on their inaction for the 8+ years I've been a member, never. 

"Sterling Silver Plated" is a contradiction in terms and would be super-easy for eBay to police (in titles), but they don't, and they're quite infamous for failing to act on reports of incorrect or misleading listing titles and descriptions. (Same goes for things listed as leather, while the description states PU leather). 

The only thing left to do is have the info available and keep trying to warn / educate the public.

(PS, I wish I could get sterling silver at 62c a gram  I usually have to pay between $1.60 - $2.20 per gram for it if I want to make something in SS, though the materials I buy do have production and finishing costs added. I can't even get silver filled for that price, but a lot of people either don't know, don't want to know, or still believe the bargain hunt / clearance rep that ebay once had). 

[gutterpunkz05]

DG,  you are being ripped off.  You should be able to buy 999 silver for less than 70 cents per gram.  But I will quite happily offer it to you for $2.20 per gram  Which is about  $68.00 per ounce.  Just tell me how much you want at that price.

[digital*ghost]

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@gutterpunkz05 wrote:

DG,  you are being ripped off.  You should be able to buy 999 silver for less than 70 cents per gram.  But I will quite happily offer it to you for $2.20 per gram  Which is about  $68.00 per ounce.  Just tell me how much you want at that price.

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My post was probably a bit vague, but I buy components, so the per-gram price includes everything involved with that - I could get some of the stuff at a lower out of pocket price, if I made them myself, but all things considered, the tools and time involved would probably blow out the costs in excess of what I pay at the moment as the companies I buy from do it on a much larger scale than I would.

Plus, I usually only make SS stuff on commission, or when I feel like being extra fancy 

[melbourneclearance]

Don't forget under 70 cents a gram is the melt price, the melters (and who knows who else) need some profit too.

For the general public, I think one good way to know the prices of 925 jewellery is to look at the major chains. Yes, yes, major chains are not always the cheapest but they're good for giving you a benchmark. Just imagine Coles selling chickens for $4/kg and a small butcher offers chickens for 40 cents a kilo. It's never gonna happen.

[springyzone]

I'm no expert on jewellery, silver or gold.

But common sense should tell people that anything $10 & under is just cheap costume jewellery and you're not going to get solid silver or gold for that price. In fact you could pay ten times that & still be looking at costume jewellery.

And the words China and authentic/quality jewellery don't go together-or at least not in the $10 & under category.

I've noticed a lot of blatant fakes on ebay, especially from China. Not necessarily just jewellery, every category. Brand name wedding frocks is a huge one.

They even steal photos from the genuine companies. Nothing much seems to happen to those sellers.

No matter which way you swing it, because of the way ebay works, with all sellers being independent of ebay, a buyer needs to be wary.

[kopenhagen5]

I think your main point is many sellers are selling silver plated metal calling it 925 which is simply fraudulent.

Even being stamped as silver when it's not.

The company eBay has primarily been expertise in computer knowledge and online programming and not experts in all industries hence the problem of being able to recognize problems not to mention being able to prove them.

Contracting experts in many fields to train staff and clean up the site would certainly be a road I would take if I was managing eBay. 

[digital*ghost]

It's funny, as when I applied to sell on the big A site, since I said I'd be listing in jewellery categories, they had a whole section that would have required me to fill out if I was selling precious metal jewellery. In a nutshell, they required proof that the items I'd be listing would, in fact, be verifiable as sterling silver etc. Not saying that wouldn't be impossible to work around if someone was determined to sell fakes intentionally, and I don't know how much they check into the info supplied, but stuff like like would at least weed out a few of the opportunistic sellers.

They put a lot of the onus on sellers to prove they're meeting site requirements before they're approved to list (in that category, at least) and there was a whole host of strict requirements even for costume jewellery (just as an example, there's a site policy that the listed length of something matches the fastened length, so if you say it's 60cm long, the fastened length can't be even 1mm under, and there's a small margin allowed for it to be over - I don't know how well these policies are policed or enforced, though).