A Las Vegas Loan Center Blog

We had a customer come in and among other things as about an Indian doll she has. Once I established that it wasn’t a Kachina but a doll that looked like an Indian I was forced to suggest that she go to the competition.

These customers also had at least one item that may have some serious value. So I suggested that they research it carefully. The library not only has books on an amazing assortment of items they have phone books from all over the country that can help locate experts in the appropriate fields. That information used in combination with the internet can give you fighting chance at sorting out who the good guys are. (The Better Business Bureaus can also be of help.) —The problem with having an item that is fairly valuable is that there are a nearly infinite number of people trying to separate a fool and their money.

We have been forced into being extremely selective about what we take in, not only has our collectibles market has tanked in a major way, the number of copies and outright fakes has skyrocketed. –The primary problem with collectibles is that they require people to have disposable income and most of our customers are struggling just to have an income. (A condition not uncommon to those of us nearer the bottom than the top of the food chain.)

At any rate I was curious about the doll so I took a quick look on the net and found a place that sells signed “American Indian dolls” with the disclaimer that they are “not Indian produced, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization. ” –These dolls sell in the hundred dollar range and remind me of collector’s plates. Buy them only if you enjoy looking at them because they’re not likely to increase in value any time soon.

Here’s my favorite -It’s title is: “Great Apache Native American Style Doll”

This company itself is based in Las Vegas, New Mexico and seems legit. But they are a “World of Products” distributor which would explain why they have no clue about real Indians and their dress.

In case you’re curious. –No Apache of any tribe ever dressed like a plains indian much less wore an eagle feather war bonnet.
————————-

Final thoughts:

If something is sold originally as a “collectible” it’s probably not.

Just because something is on a dealer’s shelf doesn’t mean anyone wants it. –Dealers make mistakes just like everyone else.

A limitation e.g. 1 of 100, doesn’t mean there is a demand.
–We have a signed limited print by “Rabbit” done in 1991 that when last I checked some of the original run of 650 could still be purchased online.

A single auction price is unreliable for determining the current value of an item:
–Some years back Eric Clapton had an auction to raise money for his rehab center. One of the items up for auction was a copy by the Fender Custom Shop of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Number One. This guitar sold new for about $10k and was limited to 10 copies, at the auction it brought something on the order of $40k. I do not believe that any of these have sold for more than $13k since.

An insurance appraisal is the expected retail replacement cost and not what you can expect to sell the item for. –Come to think of it, it doesn’t even guarantee that the insurance company will pay that amount. But it gives you a fighting chance.

So do your homework and unless you’re positive you can sell it for a quick profit, buy only what you really like. –You never can tell, you may turn out to be the only person in the known universe that wants it.

Today we had to paint the back of our building because of taggers.

In the city of Las Vegas you can be fined if you don’t cover up the graffiti that appears every few days.

In our case we repaint portions of the building about twice a month. –It seems to take the taggers about that long to tag the building badly enough to be worth the effort.

We use the “paint crew,” an airless paint gun made by Wagner. New it costs $198 from Home Depot and it’s well worth the price. –One person painted approximately 700 sq ft in about half an hour including clean-up time.

Also, with all the painting we have been forced to do we no longer try to match the exact color. Instead we mix the dark brown with some off-white until it looks about right. –We have found that if we start out a bit lighter than we think we need the color winds up close enough so it doesn’t look too bad.

We know the graffiti is here to stay, but the thing that’s really annoying is that, judging by the quality of the writing, the taggers are getting older and are using larger, more elaborate lettering, that takes up more wall space.

It’s a bigger pain to set up than it looks and I’m not sure it’s the right solution. But it works for now.
======================

On another note. I was photographing more of our Swarovski Crystal and found two broken pieces. At a glance they didn’t appear to be damaged but when I started to take pictures the damage jumped out at me.

The first was a kangaroo that is missing an ear. The damage isn’t noticeable until you look close. It didn’t occur to me that anything was amiss until I turned the piece to get the other ear in the picture….. Oops

The other is a shepherd with a missing thumb. The only reason I noticed that was because the statue didn’t hold the crook right. The fracture is there but is difficult to see even when you’re looking for it. It must be something about the number of facets and the clarity of the crystal.

If you have crystal it’s probably a good idea to take it out periodically and give it a good cleaning. This not only gives you a chance to look it over carefully, it guarantees that your crystal will always look it’s best.

I found myself complaining about shooting in dim light so I bought a pair of EiKO 105w Florescent bulbs. These are 105w actual output and are equivalent to 500w incandescent bulbs.

There is just one itty bitty problem.

Yep. It’s just over 11″ long, and the base isn’t long enough to use with my 10″ Smith-Victor reflectors… Oops.

I figure I’ll just invert the bells so I have something to tape to and use some Bristol board to avoid having the glare cause problems with the sensors on my camera and to give directionality to the light.

I know I won’t be able to use diffusers and these bulbs are not dimmable but if I use my light tent I can always throw a piece of white background cloth over the side if the light is too bright.

First a bit of advice:
You don’t need a fancy equipment to shoot for the web.

I use a Nikon D300 because I own a D300 I also have a Canon SX10 that would work nicely and a Canon sb700 that I have used for any number of shots for ebay and the web.

As I tell nearly everyone who asks, you can get away from the expensive lights by using an old pair of thrift store desk lamps. Just tape a bit of white cloth over the ends of the shades to act as diffusers.

For the infinity back ground sweep you can get a piece of needle point backing taped to any convenient object to provide the curve and then just lay your colored paper or cloth on top of it.

I decided that since the market here isn’t what it used to be I would put our Swarovski Crystal on our website.

This seems simple enough. –Then I ran into the same problem I had photographing diamonds, but on a much larger scale.

Here is crystal and gold apple approximately 2″ in diameter that gave me a major headache.

Normally if you light it right crystal reflects the light back through the facets from the inside. This one insisted on going black. This was particularly annoying until I saw that it opened.

Those two interior surfaces are not only black, but highly reflective. I assume that the apple was designed to display another small item. -Like this gold and crystal gift box that I got decent shot of on the first try.

The closed apple and the box are sitting on a piece of clear plastic with the underside painted black.

The open apple is on a piece of clear plastic painted copper on the underside. (The trick of painting the plastic on the underside comes from rc model builders who want the vehicle to look new even if it bumps something.)

I lit them with a pair of small Porta-Trace light tables with a couple of pieces of white backdrop material thrown over them to act as scrims and a hand held gold colored reflector. –I normally shoot reflective items in a light tent to minimize reflections from the room.

I shot them with my 18-200mm Nikkor with an ISO of 200 and an aperture f/11.

The light was dim and the exposures were long so I used a remote trigger to avoid camera vibration.

The shots are far from perfect but I find them to be acceptable.

Your biggest enemy when using a black reflective surface is dust, followed closely by various smudges and fingerprints, and if you set the item directly on a piece of fabric you may find the weave of the cloth to be a distraction.

Did you know that if your boss issues you a company cellphone you owe taxes on a portion of the usage?

I didn’t until I read an article in the Washington Post that said the IRS was trying to simplify the way this tax is figured.

Back in the Eighties Congress passed a law requiring the value of employer-issued cellphones to be included in workers’ gross income, unless an employee kept detailed records showing the phone was used only for work.

Now, with the vast numbers of cellphones in use the IRS is trying to figure out how to profit from it. —I mean…. how to most fairly assess the portion of the phone bill that should be taxed.

The law was designed to prevent employees from using employee-issued cellphones for personal calls and then writing them off as a work-related tax deduction. But keeping the necessary records to prove that employees are not abusing the benefit has proven cumbersome.

The IRS presented three options to simplify the documentation for employers:

One is to deem 75 percent of work cellphone use as related to work and the remaining 25 percent for personal use. Employees would be taxed on the value of the personal minutes.

Under a second option, employees would provide proof that they have a personal cellphone to use during work hours.

A third would let employers use a statistical sampling to determine the average workers’ use of the cellphones for personal calls.

The folks in congress have tried to get this law thrown out. The last time around the bill passed the house but failed in the senate.

This year it’s being tried again. –The only thing we have to worry about is how much unrelated crap will get folded-in, when all the bill should do repeal a rather insignificant law.

We have a number of Omega watches including a couple of Seamasters and a Constellation.

One of the Seamasters is a 1986 stainless steel w/ original stainless bracelet, with a gold face and an aftermarket diamond bezel.

Because of the vast number of variations within the Seamaster line it took a bit of research to determine whether or not the dial is correct and I believe it is.

I found a good photo of another 1986 Seamaster Chronometer online, the face is a different color but the lettering is identical and I haven’t seen this location and spacing on any other year. –This doesn’t mean there isn’t another year that used this layout. It just means I couldn’t find one.

The watch was obviously worn on a daily basis and as a result has some extremely minor damage around the very edge of the bezel but you have to look very closely to see it, mostly it just needs a good cleaning. –Always clean any piece of piece you put out because nobody wants to buy a piece of jewelry or a watch covered in somebody else’s grime.

Not too long ago any Seamaster or Constellation would have been snapped up immediately, but in Las Vegas the market has gone soft so we are going to display them online in hopes of reaching a larger market.

In fact, for a while Omega watches were in such high demand that we saw almost as many fake Omegas as we did fake Rolexes.

One bit of useful information is that the serial number on most Seamasters is on the underside of the case lug at 7:00. It’s in extremely fine print so clean the area well and use your loop. In the case of our 1986 model it’s also on the action.

The serial number can date the watch to the approximate, but not exact, year. Here’s one list at Chronomaddox.

On the subject of fakes: We had a couple of guys come in and try to pawn a fake Rolex that was so bad the movement literally rattled around in the case.

These are just a few notes on pearls I’ve made for myself:

If you’re selling pearls never use the word “natural” unless you have the lab report to back it up. Use the word “genuine” instead.

When buying or loaning on a strand of pearls, start by just looking at it. -Treat it like you would a Rolex- If it’s too light or just doesn’t look right you are probably safe going with your gut instincts.

When held up to a bright light or taken out into the sun, are the pearls identical in color and luminescence or are there small variances? If they appear to be identical the odds are that they’re fake.

Does the setting match the apparent quality? Good strands are strung on silk, knotted between the pearls and use gold or platinum fixtures.

Does the clasp appear to be of a quality and age to match the strand? –If the clasp is marked 18k but tests 14k the entire strand should be considered suspect.

Pearls are dyed, bleached, polished, coated with beeswax, heat treated and irradiated and many times, without the services of a reputable of a lab, this can be impossible to detect.

Dyes and wax can fill in surface imperfections and will generally look different at those points. Either the small imperfections will be a different color or have a different luster.

Black Pearls start at about 8mm so if the pearl is smaller than that it’s probably dyed.

In addition there are any number of fakes. –One scam I read about consisted of coating a fake pearl with a coating of powdered real pearl to give it a degree of natural luminescence and the right tooth feel..

The tooth test can differentiate between glass or plastic and pearl, but that’s about it.

If the drill hole appears chipped or has flaking edges when examined through a jeweler’s loupe it’s probably a fake. The edges of the holes in real pearls appear sharp. They are also drilled from both sides to meet in the middle so the hole isn’t always straight. –The drill hole can also show you evidence of dying.

Genuine pearls, cultured or natural are never perfect and tend to have visible surface imperfections. Cultured pearls also tend to be rounder than natural pearls.

If a strand of natural pearls is perfectly matched and being offered at a price real people can afford —-They are almost certainly fake.

Today we had a returning customer ask to take out a title loan, unfortunately the last pay stub he had was from February, and given the rash of recent layoffs we require some sort of proof of current employment.

We contacted Walmart and received a fax telling us that if we need to verify the employment of a Walmart employee we can do it online, through an outfit called “The Work Number.”

He was gone by the time we received the fax. But because of the way he was acting we were a little leery of his story and thought he might try to get a loan at one of our other offices. So we went to “The Work Number” website and discovered that verification through them costs nearly $14.

In 2004 Walmart contracted with Talx Corp, inc. -the parent company of the online employment database “The Work Number”- to handle all employment verification.

Some child support agencies have a 1-800 number they can call, but they still have to wait up to 5 days for a return fax. –If this is the norm it would make the service worthless to companies trying to complete the loan process in a matter of minutes or even hours.

As it turns out there are a number of large companies, including Ford Motors and GE, that have contracted with Talx to provide employment verification not just to finance companies and credit agencies but for the paperwork associated with verifying employment for non-custodial parents as regards income-withholding orders, medical support and other government services.

The real question in my mind is, assuming for the moment that the online version takes a few minutes instead of a few days, whether we pass the $14 cost on to the customer or absorb it.

This is just a short note to remind people that Rolex may be the king of fakes but everything under the sun is being relabeled to pass as real.

I saw a fake Selmer series 101 oboe yesterday.
The first clue was that it wasn’t in a Selmer case. –Any instrument that costs $3000 is going to be well taken care of and will in all probability be kept in it’s original case.
The give away was that the lettering wasn’t sharp and it lacked the logo. –Even stamped though it’s into wood the lettering on a Selmer is always crisp and will always include the Selmer logo.

An expensive guitar will nearly always come in a brand name case and the name on the headstock of any major brand of high end guitar will be an inlay and not a decal.

There is a fake Panasonic portable dvd making the rounds. The first clue is the lack of a battery. Portable dvd players are designed to be portable not tied to a wall socket.

Look closely and then check what similar models look like and how they are configured.

The largest number of fake items we see are video cameras. They usually have the Sony logo but it’s generally glued on and not inset. They tend to lack things like and actual tape or mini-dvd burner and will rely instead on a cheap memory card.

Spotting fakes can be tough, but most are badly done and can be identified with very little effort.

And lastly, as politically incorrect as this is: If they don’t know what they have, or they just plain don’t look like they could afford the item, be very suspicious of that $3000 oboe. It’s probably a fake.