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Hi Josh,
Great topic. As a collector, I see this fairly frequently. In my opinion, people do this for a variety of reasons:
1. Dealers sometimes think the new buyer will want to personalize the piece with their own info, so they remove the old engraving. People that remove the engraving for this reason tend to do it very carefully and professionally, as opposed to the hack job you've pictured.
2. A family is selling it from the estate of a deceased relative and for personal reasons they do not want their relative's name on the piece.
3. Perhaps a person either stole the badge or they happen to know it was stolen, and they don't want it to be tracked.
4. Dealers (and disgruntled members perhaps) find they get hassled a lot less on ebay if they don't show traceable info in their auction listing. Some just choose not to show a picture of the back. Some remove the engraving altogether. Another unfortunate side-effect of harassing the ebay sellers.
Personally Josh, I'd guess this pin was stolen. Balfour Company only used the "BC" trademark on pins very recently (from around 1980 when goldfilled pins starting showing up en masse, until I think the early 1990s when they sold off the GLO pin division to Masters of Design). So it's unlikely this badge belonged to an elderly alumnus who recently passed.
Anyway, when I see a dealer with a pin like this, I always point out to them that defacing the badge drastically reduces the value for two reasons. One, physically damaging ANY piece of jewelry or any antique for that matter detracts from value. Two, removing the name makes tracing the date of origin virtually impossible, which makes the badge much less desired by both collectors and members of that GLO alike. Collectors typically want to know how old and historically significant the badge is. Members of that GLO typically enjoy the sentimental value of wearing a previous member's badge.
Most of the time, I figure the dealer I'm talking to isn't the one who did the defacing. Having said that, you sometimes see a dealer with like 10 pins and ALL of them have the engravings removed. Then it's fairly obvious. But either way, it helps to get the message out in the dealer community that this practice is a lose-lose situation for everyone.
Just as in the case of scrap/repair jewelers removing gems (or melting the pin entirely), the mass pin market that ebay opened up has made it clear to these people that keeping the pins intact is the more lucrative choice. Ultimately that benefits the greek community. As I've said before, there ARE advantages to seeing so many high priced pins on ebay.
wptw
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