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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;MrNate, post: 542491, member: 5515&quot;]Great question, and I think I have a good answer. Regarding the marking, it&#039;s definitely stamped in, but the marks weren&#039;t available to other buyers. One detail to add to the story; there was only one photo on the listing just showing the set, and not the bottom of the items. Even though the listing clearly states they are sterling silver, many hunters likely passed up on even inquiring about them because there wasn&#039;t any proof in the photo. I have NO DOUBT that if the seller had included a photo of the bottom of the set, they would have been bought by someone else quickly (probably in the first 20 minutes it went up). </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve done WAYYY more online browsing for silver than I should admit, and I&#039;ve noticed countless listings where someone calls something &quot;sterling silver&quot; when almost all of it is actually silver plated. I don&#039;t think most of these people are intentionally trying to deceive others, but rather I think most people don&#039;t know much about silver marks (I was formerly one of those). So they just assume everything is called sterling silver. </p><p><br /></p><p>Another factor to consider that komokwa alluded to: there&#039;s lots of people hunting for silver, both collectors and scrappers. If a scrapper figured out these were actually sterling, they would have bought it on the spot. It&#039;s the equivalent of the person selling the items saying &quot;hey if you give me $100 I&#039;ll give you $300+ dollars right now.&quot; Anyone would take that deal, so I&#039;m just lucky that no one else sniffed it out even though the signs were pretty obvious to me. </p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s a couple signs I&#039;ve observed when hunting online:</p><p><br /></p><p>Many times, smaller and lighter is an indication it may be real. Manufacturers of sterling silver are trying to max out on their profits, so they want to conserve the amount of silver they use. I&#039;m always looking closely at the mouth of teapots/coffee pots because generally if it has a thick edge of metal at the mouth, it&#039;s going to be plated. I&#039;d say thickness of this mouth is about half the thickness of the plated ones. The other area I focus in on is the handles. The connection between the handle is a good indicator of quality of production, and the size matters too. The handles of the two smaller items stood out to me immediately as the correct thickness for sterling rigidity without using too much silver in the production process. </p><p><br /></p><p>The other indicator that stood out to me on this set was all the residual polish from the last time someone cleaned it. This is a stretch, but my logic was if someone is slabbing on that much polish to clean the items, you would expect to see worn plate on the items after doing that for many years (imagine this was 100 year old quadruple plate it would start wearing down) and I didn&#039;t see any wear of the plate which suggested it could be real. </p><p><br /></p><p>One more tiny detail I saw. Notice in the first photo at the top of the handle the little pin is pushed too much to one side? This clued me in that the handle was likely hollow rather than base metal or cement filled. You can see the little hole. I carefully hammered them all back to a good position because the handle was pretty unstable. So I think the little details form the bigger story with some of these items.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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