A similar question came up a few weeks ago (November 24) about the Legacy Zip's actual production dates, please read this too:
AUTHENTICATE This COACH
Excellent information, and I think your supposition is valid. O/T, Hyacinth, is there an actual list posted of eBay sellers who, shall we say, merit special scrutiny when it comes to authenticity? Or is just a piecemeal kind of thing when a poster here asks?
We really can't list any special sellers, although often when someone asks about an item we may refer to the seller as a Trusted Seller. These are people who we know are experienced with Coach and only buy from legitimate sources. There are thousands of honest sellers at Ebay and other auction sites, and listing only a few hundred that we know really isn't fair to the others.
But anyone can make a mistake, even Trusted Sellers, so we always urge people to have items authenticated. For instance, the subject of serial numbers and production codes is almost impossible to understand and every day I learn something new or have to revise something I thought I knew. I doubt that most full-time Ebay sellers have as much spare time to spend as I do on the subject, and it's understandable if a very accurate fake slips by them once in a while.
We DO urge regular buyers and sellers to keep their own lists of recommended and Not recommended sellers, and there are also places here for sellers to find names of buyers who should be blocked from bidding. It takes time and a willingness to read or at least scan all or most of the posts in this thread on a daily basis but it's really the only way to be accurate and fair to all sellers.
BTW, the Search feature here is also a good way to weed out some of the more notorious sellers, once you're comfortable using it. One problem is that sellers with things like asterisks, dashes and underscores in their IDs may not get picked up by the forum's search software, but we recommend Searching all the forums here for their IDs and also checking their FULL Feedback history at http://Toolhaus.org before bidding on anything at Ebay.