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GeoCoin Theft


lavalake

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Perhaps I am confused however I paid for a GeoCoin, activated it and sent it on its way with a mission. My coin only made a couple of hundred miles when it went mising. I notice a whole raft of forums selling coin collections. Is it possible that my coin has been 'Collected?' I didn't want the coin collected - I wanted it to have a healthy life travelling the world.

 

Is this normal? Are the 'collections' being sold in this forum personal items or coins that have been 'stolen?' Why should I bother to send out another coin or a TB?

 

Thanks in anticipation for your coments. :rolleyes:

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Perhaps I am confused however I paid for a GeoCoin, activated it and sent it on its way with a mission. My coin only made a couple of hundred miles when it went mising. I notice a whole raft of forums selling coin collections. Is it possible that my coin has been 'Collected?' I didn't want the coin collected - I wanted it to have a healthy life travelling the world.

 

Is this normal? Are the 'collections' being sold in this forum personal items or coins that have been 'stolen?' Why should I bother to send out another coin or a TB?

 

Thanks in anticipation for your coments. :rolleyes:

 

Search the forums and you will find quite a few threads like your one.

 

It happens unfortunately, but yours may not have been stolen - it may have just been misplaced or temporarily forgotten about by a geocacher.

 

The coins being sold in these forums and on eBay are 99.99% legitimate - they are being sold by the rightful owner of them. People collect geocoins like others do stamps, and similarly people sell and trade geocoins.

 

Geocoins released into the wild do go missing - a lot. There are areas where coin thieves are at work who steal them for their collections; sometimes geocaches get muggled; sometimes a geocacher picks up a geocoins but for gets to log it and it sits in their backpack for 6 months before they do something with it.

 

Missing geocoins do sometimes come back into play - sometimes years after they went missing.

 

Don't give up hope.

Edited by keewee
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As a collector I take objection to the assumption, my coins could be stolen.

 

The coins in my collection are partly activated, mostly unactivated and I either bought them at the numerous vendors or traded for them with other coiners.

 

 

As a cacher who's sent out travellers, I can sympathise with the upset about a missing coin.

 

 

Just this week I had one of these highly precious moments, when a long lost traveller turns up again.

 

My coin has been missing together with the cachebox since January 2009.

Now a cacher tells a friend of his about geocaching, she tells him, her friend brought one of these boxes home ages ago. He ask, if that box is still around, she asks her friend and low and behold the box turnes up and inside is my coin.

 

Those stories are every cachers dream and a reason, why I wouldn't send out a proxy, ever.

I'd rather have lost coins in my profile, but in the rare occassion, these turn up again, I'd rather don't have any confusion...

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Yours is an activated coin. For anyone to want to buy it they will most certainly expect to have ownership adopted over to them. Anyone daft enough to try to sell it without being able to justify why they can't adopt it or why they are not the owner of record will soon have the new owner and you emailing each other and looking to get together to string the jerk up by his/her more sensitive parts. Just sayin'.

 

Edit to add... as to the collections issue - people have been buying, selling, manufacturing and releasing geocoins for 8 or 9 years. Some like their coins more in hand and keep them to enjoy them at home. Some will design or commission a design and have a coin minted to trade for other coins or even just to sell and recoup some of the costs while keeping a few to trade, release or give away. There is an entire little economy of geocoins out there with the ones in caches being a tip of the iceberg and like an iceberg there is more than meets the eye. So, you see, collections are not the ill begotten gains of swine but the accumulations of very honest geocoin buyers, traders and makers.

 

As for what you should do.... that's up to you. Make your own experiences and learn from those. Just because someone has had different or challenging stories to tell doesn't mean you're destined to have the same. Have fun and create your own stories.

Edited by Droo
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Thank you everyone for your encouraging comments. I was quite dispondent when I launched this discussion and I am now extremely happy that I am a member of a community that is not only honest but a great gang to be a member of. I hope I didn't offend anyone with my rather sharp approach. I will continue to send out coins and bugs and hope that one day my coin will emerge with great stories of its secret un-logged voyage. Thanks again and Happy caching.

 

Kind Regards

 

Dave (lavalake) :rolleyes:

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This past summer 2001 while in the Adorondack mountains of Upstate New York we found a "proxy card for a geocoin that went missing. One side had Norwegian Nordkapp #2NOHKV0 and a cartoon fellow on it. Can anyone tell me what these are for and what they mean? I wanted to update the owner but don't know how. Please either respond here or at capzoo@rochester.rr.com Thanks.

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This past summer 2001 while in the Adorondack mountains of Upstate New York we found a "proxy card for a geocoin that went missing. One side had Norwegian Nordkapp #xxxxx and a cartoon fellow on it. Can anyone tell me what these are for and what they mean? I wanted to update the owner but don't know how. Please either respond here or at capzoo@rochester.rr.com Thanks.

Hi Capzoo & welcome!,

The card you found is the traveler, looking at the 'coin's' page the picture is a 'proxy' for the coin (want some entertaining reading and have a few hours days to kill search proxies in these forums). Treat it as you would the actual coin. Some folks send out representatives of coins to prevent the actual piece of metal from disappearing.

On another note, you should go back and edit your post to remove the tracking number- prevents folks who don't get within a thousand miles of coin from discovering it for the profile icon (or worse, 'picking it up' and creating havoc with the tracking..

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...Those stories are every cachers dream and a reason, why I wouldn't send out a proxy, ever.

I'd rather have lost coins in my profile, but in the rare occassion, these turn up again, I'd rather don't have any confusion...

 

Another way proxies may be used is to send out instead of a coin you may want to keep in your colection. Part of what you've paid for is a tracking number...employing a proxy allows you to use it, while keeping posession of the coin, not to mention giving cachers who are into that sort of thing the opportunity to add an icon to their profile (albeit at the same time denying them the joy of seeing and holding the actual coin - for this reason it is always nicest if traveler profiles are worded to clearly indicate what is out there is a proxy and not the actual coin).

 

Personally, I will likely never release another coin into the wild again. I don't like spending my money to fund thieves' collections...and as stated before it's not a matter of "if," but "when."

Edited by fivedime
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Unfortunatelly there are so many coins that are being stolen.... :(

 

I just checked mine.... I have 67 activated... from them... 11 are in my collection, plus one that I sent a proxy out!

 

The proxy was stollen with the whole cache... but at least it was just a proxy....

 

Anyway... if from the 67 will take out the 12.... there are 55 travellers that I owe... right? well... only 10 are still moving, and 2 shoed some movement 3-4 months ago!

 

All the others have at least 6 months without movement until some years (2-3 years)! there is a coin in a cache from 2009! but most of them are in the hands of cachers who... stoped caching or still go but they do not drop my coins! I emaild to some twice and I was very polite! I do not know what to do anymore... I didn't want to mark them as Stollen... because it will not be good for their image.. but now I am starting to think that.....

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See my post signature.

 

I no longer get upset about lost or stolen trackables. I have released over 150 TBs and only 1 GC. I have over 50 GCs in my collection and will NEVER release another GC because it WILL end up missing or stolen.

 

But.....for any missing TB or GC I create another trackable item with the trackable code. I don't create or send out proxy coins beccause I don't like them. I stamp the code into a dog tag, attach some worthless object to it and send it on its way.

 

I wish GS would sell just the codes to individuals. If they did this I would just make my own trackables and save some money. *unapproved link removed by moderator*

Edited by Eartha
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Unfortunatelly there are so many coins that are being stolen.... :(

 

I just checked mine.... I have 67 activated... from them... 11 are in my collection, plus one that I sent a proxy out!

 

The proxy was stollen with the whole cache... but at least it was just a proxy....

 

Anyway... if from the 67 will take out the 12.... there are 55 travellers that I owe... right? well... only 10 are still moving, and 2 shoed some movement 3-4 months ago!

 

All the others have at least 6 months without movement until some years (2-3 years)! there is a coin in a cache from 2009! but most of them are in the hands of cachers who... stoped caching or still go but they do not drop my coins! I emaild to some twice and I was very polite! I do not know what to do anymore... I didn't want to mark them as Stollen... because it will not be good for their image.. but now I am starting to think that.....

 

I mark my missing trackables as missing as soon as I know. The one coin I released went missing after the cache I put it in. Marked it missing when I didn't get a response from the person who was holding on it as it appeared they dipped their toe into caching and left.

 

In the future I will take my geocoin codes (when I get geocoins) and attach them like a travel bug to objects I don't care about and send it on its way. I won't be sending out the real coins anymore. They will go missing, that's just the reality. But I'd rather have the metal coin in my possession if all that's going ot happen is they go missing. To me that's just like throwing money out the window, especially the coins aren't traveling that far.

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What we need is Geocoin that has some electronic way of knowing it has been stolen, or just not moved on by a newby. This special coin should explode with powerful force if not placed into a cache within a reasonable amount of time....like say...three months.

 

An audio and visual warning and instructions need to be part of the coin so that whoever picks it up knows exactly what is expected of them. This will also help blind or deaf cachers (and YES, there are blind cachers).

 

If they do not follow the instructions in the allotted amount of time then BOOOOOOOOOOOM!!! They and their house or apartment are gone.

 

The owner of the cache can not be held responsible for the loser's....I mean new cacher's for geocoin thief's death, because they were warned that the object they are holding is dangerous if not handled correctly.

 

I think this is just like a person operating a car...we all know they are dangerous and we could kill ourselves with them if we do not follow the warnings in the owners manual. Yet people are killed in them everyday through there own fault.

 

I think the number of exploding Geocoin deaths would be far lower then the number of yearly automobile fatalities.

 

I think this would help if the problem of missing or stolen geocoins.

Edited by GermanyBert
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Most of my lost coins are marked as stollen because that is what happent to them! someone went....took the coin and left without logging etc (so the coins shows that it is in the cache..)!!

if the coin was lost by a cacher... and he/she tells me that... I will mark it missing... if the whole cache is stollen...

 

Of course I do not know what to do in cases when cachers hold my coins... they keep caching or not...

I can understand if someone by any reason didn't go geocaching and kept my coin for 6 months or a year... but he should send an email to me to know! But what about if someone is keeping my coin from 2009 doesn't respond to any of my emails of he responded to one saying that he had health problems.. (I respect that!!!) but what about after 2 years and when I see that he keeps going geocaching? if I mark it as missing... I do not know if this will change anything! Once that I marked a coin as stollen... it suddently appeared in an other cache far away.... lo logs nothing at all!

 

of couse I do not know if I will mark them as stollen... by that way I will be photographing the cacher... but...

 

Yes, by sending a coin out... do not expect to see it again... but there are coins that were won etc by you.... were activated and send out... wouldn't at least be nice to see that coin from close? the worse is to see it beeing stollen when it reached close to you... and you never had a chance to see how it looks! :(

 

I didn't like proxies either but when I started seeing my coins getting stollen... I changed that... if a proxy is well made...

 

I am wondering... the dissapointment to find a proxy coin instead of the real, even if the proxy at least has the photo of the coin or it is a great replica.... is bigger than to find just a code stamped on a dogtag with something attached? Is it better to find a non official TB.. with tha icon of a coin than to find a good proxy? for me.. the dissapointment would had been the same! and what is the difference from a virtual log then? I do not even know how the coin look like!

 

see... things are complicated in these areas! :D

 

Oh... I do not think the cache owner can be responsible for any stollen coins from his cache! most of the times.. the responsible is the cacher who droped it there! if you drop a coin and in the next day someone goes and says that he didn't see the coin... something happent! I do not mean that the first cacher stole it... but probably was not so careful and someone a muggle saw him dropping these things... so....

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