I imagine that you can lay some of the blame on
Storage Wars. It featured an episode in which one of the auction-buying guys (I don't actually watch the show) bought an "NES-001", thinking it was worth $13,000 because that was the price one had fetched at another auction. What he didn't know was that other NES was sold with a sealed copy of Stadium Events. It's likely everyone and their mother who saw that episode thought they were sitting on a gold mine if they had an "NES-001" collecting dust in their crawlspace.
Here's an article that details it a little bit, which includes a link to said episode.
http://kotaku.com/5830709/but-if-you-call-it-an-nes+001-is-it-worth-13000I actually saw a post on craigslist in which a person was selling their NES that they had from childhood, touting that it was the kind that went for big bucks on
Storage Wars, ridiculously overestimating it's worth.