well gailen, sorry but english is not my mother tongue, anyway i will give it a shot. I try toexplain it slooooooowly.
there we goooooooooo : First option (dagger is fake and Mongo has to go to court to get a refund). If unlucky this can take years and loads of cash (my brother is a lawyer and he told me stories that give you the creeps.) if there's isn't a decent sales-contract with the money back garantee on paper then I'm afraid it's Mongo's word against the crooks word. Not the best start of a trial. Other problem : as mentioned by Railgun88 , which authority will be able to say for 100% sure that it's fake or real?
see a post of mine on german combat awards, on a very strange radio observer badge. In the beginning almost everybody think it's fake and at the end of the post they think it's an original badge with production error. Human errors occur every day. Nobody can tell 100% for sure if a piece is real/fake.
Some remarks on option2 :
OK the seller didn't keep his word, that's true but does this mean that the dagger is fake. example : I sold a DLV dagger (in used condition) , sold it with "not original money back" , buyer had buyer's remourse and wanted to send it back because it was fake (he had it checked by Detlev Niemann) . I posted pics on this forum (post still might be somewhere around)and we all agreed that is was 100% real but in used condition (which he was aware off, since I took more the 20 pics of the dagger ). So I did not refunded the money, nevertheless the expert Niemann said is was fake, we all believed that it was textbook. Does this make me dishonest?
What worries me the most is that everybody is allready jumping to conclusions, while only few have seen the dagger in real. Gailen, from what i have read, you might be one of the few to be in a respectable position to comment the dagger, but IMO most of the other are just jumping on the wagon. How many of the guys that replied actually own a full rohm Eickhorn to compare it with ?
So isn't this a bit of mass hysteria ? If one thinks it's bad we all go saying it's bad.
funny thing, just sold a Para badge to a Dutch guy today. He replied that he is very eager for the badge to arrive since he sold a good badge a year ago after the badge was slashed on the whermacht awards forum. After a month or so he did find out it's was real, but too late since he resold it. I guess we all know stories like this aswell.
So my point was, the keep an open mind, there might still be a positive side to the story. But I guess some see a half empty glass, some half full.
And please do not misunderstand me , this must be a sh*tty situation to be in , one i rather wouldn't be in. But our negative feedback doesn't really help Mongo neither.
