Hope is another Beanie Baby currently making the rounds on the internet “rarest beanies” lists. How it made that list in the first place is puzzling, other than a lack of research and just looking at the highest prices Beanies are being listed at, and everyone copying everyone else.

Hope is one of the most common Beanies ever made. It was manufactured during the height of the craze when Ty was making millions of them.

Many believe that Hope has “error tags”. While there are some errors on some tags, they were mass produced and are NOT considered rare by collectors. It’s pure internet hoax.

FACTS:

• There are punctuation & spacing issues. These were printed in the millions and do NOT add any value.
• Gasport instead of Gosport – Gasport misspelling was on many swing tags, and as such does not affect the value.
• Ty intentionally put a space before the exclamation point.

• The year on the tush tag vs inside the swing tag may be different – this is normal. Hope’s tush tag has 1999 date and it’s swing tag has a 1998 birthdate. The tush tag gives the year Ty copyrighted the Beanie name and will always stay the same on all Beanies with that name. The swing tag date is a made-up birthdate, could be of a secretary, friend, event, etc.
• TY INC., (period and comma after “INC.,”) on tush tag was the way Ty intended it to be.
• Oakbrook written as one word, not 2 – that is how Ty intended it to be on both swing and tush tag. It’s not an error. 
• All Hope Beanie Babies came with P.E. Pellets.
• NO PA. 1965(KR) on the tush tag – KR on the tush tag does not mean it was made in Korea. The “KR” is part of the patent info. 1965(KR) does not mean it was for the Korean market. Hope Beanie babies were never made in Korea and there is no Korean market.

• Stamp inside the tush tag (or NO stamp) – the stamp is referred to as a “factory” stamp, which indicates which factory these beanies were produced at, and is really not important. The exception would be the different stamp numbers inside the Peace Beanie babies tush tags.     

• Hope came with a HOLOGRAM tush tag in 7th generation (looped) and 8th generation (single, flat)

You’ve seen high sales? So have we, but they’re fake. Sometimes it’s a seller trying to keep the rumors going. They set up a listing and have a friend buy it. Sometimes it’s a vigilante buyer trying to hurt a seller. Money laundering also happens but not as often as a few years ago.

Where is all of this misinformation coming from? In 2014 (some say 2013) a list of rare beanies appeared on a click bait “news” site.  The information spread like wildfire amongst resellers who do not know the hobby. Every few months a new list comes out from some website trying to get easy click bait traffic. They change a few details, change out a few Beanies and get it 99% wrong.

Why do we see alleged high dollar “sales” on eBay? First, we have to separate what looks sold from what sellers are asking. Sellers can ask whatever they want.  The high dollar asking prices are from people who believe what they read on the internet. You know, because everything you read on it is true. The alleged “sold” prices are a different matter. They usually fall into 5 different categories.

• Seller sets up a “fake” sale and has someone “buy” it to keep the rumors going. Remember, payment does not have to be made for it to show sold.
• Vigilante bidders trying to teach the seller a lesson. This can only happen if the seller has “make an offer” or doesn’t have instant payment required. The buyer never pays. Our understanding of this is two-fold.  One, to get the the item off the market. Two, hoping that the seller has to pay final value fees before filing non paying bidder.
• Money laundering – yes, it happens. Don’t understand it?  Watch Breaking Bad.
• Black market items – this is a new one that has been passed around from collectors of other items. We have no idea how that works or if it’s been proven.
• Buyer scams

So, let’s take a look at some high prices and dig into the details.

The first one shows sold for $14,000.00 with 1 Bid.

Let’s look inside:

This looks like a decent seller with some feedback. Let’s look further at the bid history of this buyer.

The buyer is “Not a registered user” and has NO feedback. What does this tell us?  It wasn’t paid for.  There’s been no feedback exchanged. More than likely this was a fake sale. No one is going to spend this type of cash from a seller when it’s available for much, much less from many well established sellers.

As you can see the seller has had NO feedback left for more than a year – so NO feedback was left for Hope.

Next:

0 feedback seller – let’s look at the multi bids history.

There appears to be 2 Bidders – The first Bidder has 0 feedback and is “Not a registered user”. They also have “automatic” bids turned on (this means if someone else places a bid higher, eBay will automatically place a higher bid for them). The second Bidder has 1 feedback, but is “Not a registered user” either. No feedback has been exchanged. NO sale.

Next:

Looks like another seller with 0 feedback and 1 bid for $10,000.00.

Let’s look inside:

As suspected – there’s a 0 feedback buyer – and NO feedback was exchanged. No sale. Again no one is going to spend this type of cash from a newbie seller when it’s available for much less from others.

Next:

This looks like a decent seller with a lot of feedback – but the listing history shows it was set up as a private listing so we can’t even check the buyer.  There’s been no feedback exchanged.

Within the last 6 months – NO Feedback was left for the Hope Beanie Baby. NO sale.

Seeing the pattern yet? We’ll leave this here because we could show you the same thing over and over and over.

The rumors regarding Hope, Jake, Curly, Valentino, Peace, Halo, Hippity, Hoppity, Floppity, Gobbles, Millennium, Glory, Boxed McDonald’s Teenie Beanies, error tags, etc., is purely click bait. If everyone is highlighting the same errors and the same Beanies then just how rare could they possibly be? There ARE rare beanies. It’s just that these are NOT the rare ones.

So what should Hope sell for?  Recent TRUE sales are shown in green: 

As you can clearly see, these prices are a far cry from the thousands of dollars claimed by these articles.

We like to say this.  If these lists were accurate every expert in the hobby would be rich and we wouldn’t be answering questions.

Check out Hope’s Beanie Fact page.

For your convenience 3 Beanie experts research and update the Beanie Babies Price Guide.  They also run a very large Beanie Babies Collectors Facebook Group to buy/sell/ask questions that aren’t covered in our many articles.