Bought a old wheat roll on auction on Ebay

Hi,
I am fairly new here but have collected a few coins here and there intermittently over much of my adult life but never really seriously until lately much to the chagrin of my wife. I have been trying to collect a few of the rarer coins lately and have been hungry to buy a 1909 S Indian head penny among other things. Someone on ebay was selling a wheat roll with a 1909 Indian on one end and a VDB on the other end of the roll. The seller implies he doesn't know what the roll contains. Of course I had bid on it in the hopes that the 1909 indian coin had "S" on the back especially since the roll is supposed to have come from Bank America in San Francisco. I took the bait and bid quite high and won. I don't know the value of coins all that well yet so I don't know if I got my money back or not but I thought I would share my experience here with you all and would appreciate your honest opinion. So here is how it went:
I got the package in the mail today and opened it. The first thing I did of course is check both ends. Indeed it did have a 1909 Indian on one end and a VDB wheat on the other end. So I opened the Indian end first and checked the coin. Unfortunately there was no "S" mintmark on the back. But the 1909 Indian did appear to be a VF or so quality coin. So I then check the back end and of course had a decent circulated 1909 VDB coin in the back. I started checking each coin there after kinda alternating one front and one back coin. Here is my assessment. There were 4 Indian heads in total but none were "S" mintmarked. However even though I'm a newbie at judging coins since the word liberty was very easily readable I would judge them to at least fine or better and most likely VF. I'll post some picks. There was a 1909 of course, a 06, 04 and 08. There was also 2 1909 VDB wheat pennies and 2 other 1909 wheats also in the roll that were not VDB's. There were several coins that appeared could be proofs or at least uncirculated. They were a 1943S, 1955S, 1954S. There were 5 other coins that looked to be somewhere between AU to uncirculated. They were 1944D, 1939D, 1945S,1909 and a 1944.

There was a bunch of S and D mintmarked coins. 1927S, 1928S, 1921S, 1939S,1911S,1921S, two 1939S, 1920D, 1950S,1917S, 1918S,1917D,1927D,1910D,1955S,1920S,1937S,1936S,1913D,1919S,1927D, 1916D, 1910, 1926D, 1925S, 1929S, 1930D, 1928S,1935S, 1923, 1914, 1930S, 1912D, 1924S, 1949D and 1913.

I counted up the number of coins and there were 52? I thought a roll was only 50?
Seems this roll had 2 extra's.
The quality of most coins was probably in the Fine plus range with only a couple that I think could drop into the good range.

 

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Nice find on the Indians. Definite seeded roll. You will learn that there are very few wild rolls left. Just Buy smart.

 

Definitely seeded Kaiser roll .

 

They do this crap with Morgan Dollars too, showing a CC on one end and a 1889 on the other. The “original” roll is stamped from a bank in Carson City, NV.
All playing on greed and people thinking they know more than the seller.

 

I'd guess the indian and vdb were seeded hence 52 coins in roll of wheaties?

 

I think what you paid for was the "experience". The coins really have little value, But what ever you learn from your experience does have value. JMHO

 

Nice assortment. Although not what you hoped for I think you did okay.

 

Appreciate the info. Somewhere along the way in my collecting I didn't seem to have valued the wheat pennies. Most of my early collecting came from metal detecting and I had put the wheaties in a plastic milk carton and somehow lost track of it between jobs, moving and wives. But I had somehow kept my silver, most Indians and the few cheap coins I had actually bought. At least now I have a fair start to a penny collection. Around the east coast the "S" and D mint pennies are harder to come by and I have quite a few now. It's not a total disappointment but it probably shortened my coin buying learning curve somewhat. I was a little skeptical actually about this endeavor which is why I thought it good to share it with other folks who may be able to learn from it as well.

When I started really semi-seriously collecting a couple months ago my goal was to try to put together a collection of good quality American coins I didn't have and ones I never heard of. When I started I didn't know there were 2 and 3 cent coins out there or many other types of American coins. But my goals keep evolving some and somehow coins that once just seemed like something we keep in our pockets I now value differently. I'm not sure it's even a good thing but I see a certain beauty in coins now. It seems like it could be a bad thing to become emotionally attached or attracted to coins. The bad is that I'm not content with good plus examples of coins for the most part now. Now I only mostly only want to collect very fine and up, more so up which gets expensive. Of course buying mint sets seems to be one solution to be able to have the finest examples but another side of that is that as you all know the toned coins also have a strong attraction too. Anyway, now I feel the need to buy some penny folders to put my expensive pennies in. I'm on my last wife I think and I probably won't be moving cause my wife don't want to so maybe I can keep track of these pennies and add a few more some of which I hope will be less expensive.

 

Oof. No such thing as "unsearched" rolls. The seller knew what was going into those rolls.
Hopefully you didn't pay too much for the learning experience.

 

Usually these rolls are a scam %100 of the time.Want to find coins like these be a CRH.Get rolls from your banks and find some coins just like those for only face.

 

She's reading over your shoulder, isn't she?

 

That roll was deliberately seeded, meaning the ends were done that way on purpose to get someone to pay a higher price. They is nothing that you should consider never searched. If you need or want a 1909-S IHC, go buy one from your LCS.

 

While not exactly the same, this reminds me of unopened proof sets, as well as Forrest Gump's "box of chocolates...you never know what you're going to get." Oh, yes...and "estate sale." It's either rarely if ever as advertised...extremely low/zero percentage that it is...and/or you're taking a big $risk. In this case with the cents, likely not so much...although don't know what was paid...but agree the experience alone was likely worth it plus some decent coins.

 

Many estate sales, and auctioneers for that matter, bring their own goodies in an attempt to sell. They drag the stuff from sale to sale until they get what they want.

 

Collecting coins is a hobby fraught with fraud, I'm afraid, but the sellers continue to prey on "new" collectors. I was privy to a bunch of "wheat ears" that my father-in -law had hoarded for years, however, I was quick to note that the new wrappers had writing that disclosed that he had indeed had them checked by another coin dealer, collector, or friend, who may have picked out all the collectable coins. Hopefully he was paid some money for any rare ones found.

 

What others have said is true. If so-called "unsearched" wheat cent rolls were truly unsearched, how did they know they were all wheat cents?

 

Years ago I had a great, unbeatable LCS. I also attended an biweekly auction. The auctioneer, who was a nice guy, would go to the LCS and buy certain coins. Then those same coins would appear in his auctions. The following week after the auction, the buyer would go into the coin shop asking how much they were worth.

 

An excellent point.

 

One nice thing is that you can return them within 30days if they fall out of favor with you. I do love the S mint mark too though, and might be torn as to what to do.

 

Just motor on. When I was about 10 living in Toronto, I went to the CNE(a large annual exposition) and using my last 50 cents, I bought a drink, and in my change, there was an 1858 American quarter. Thinking I had found a really rare coin, I had to walk most of the way home because all I had was a streetcar ticket and that quarter. I still have the quarter and it is still not worth much, but I'll keep it.