So you found a cute teddy bear at a garage sale which turns out to be the most rare one ever and is worth thousands. Nice story which (almost) is a real one.
A British couple recently went to a garage sale and found a cute purple Beanie Babies teddy bear. Leah Rogers and Ryan Flanaghan bought fit for about 15 dollars and took it home.
Ryan is a former collector of Beanie Babies so he thought the teddy bear is the limited edition Princess Diana Di Beanie Baby. It is possibly the rarest Beanie Babie toy ever since only 100 were made. And being the most sought after, it is also the most expensive.
So instead of keeping it, they decided to sell it immediately. Flanaghan put it on eBay for an inital 20 000 pounds. He then saw another listing for the same bear which was a whopping 62 500 pounds.
The couple hopes they can sell the teddy bear and use the money for a down payment on a house. The problem is, that might not happen.
The specialized site tycollector.com has issued a fraud alert warning collectors that the Diana teddy bear is not worth much no matter which production run it is. The warning on TYcollector is quite strongly worded:
“In an irresponsible and non-professionally researched newspaper article on April 18, 2015, the UK Daily Mail and The Sun (UK) provided misleading information about Princess Beanie Baby values. Once again, tycollector.com was inundated with emails from people in the UK and Ireland hopeful that their Princess Beanie Baby was worth a lot of money and asking for the best way to sell theirs.
The writer of the original article (as is usual with these types of articles) used “listing” prices on eBay, as opposed to the prices buyers have actually paid for Princess over the past 30 – 60 days, to support the premise that Princess is valuable. One cannot avoid speculation about the credibility of ANY article in the UK Daily Mail or The Sun, when those online magazines/newspapers permit such a misleading article as the one about the Princess Beanie Baby to be published”, the site writes.
Having trouble calculating the worth of your Beanie Babies? Check this simple guide. It is made especially for the times you suddelny found an old Beanie Babie you forgot.
The range of purple Beanie Babies teddy bears was created in December 1997 to raise money for the Princess of Wales Memorial Trust. The first edition was thought to be the most rare and expensive Beanie Babie ever. But it is not. It is worth around as much as the rest runs – 20 or so pounds.
