Fakes and Forgeries

I try not to pass up an opportunity to buy a fake, especially if it's a good one. I always been one to share knowledge freely, and hope one day to have an educational facility for my trade (Jewellery). When I was learning, my employers head office had a room dedicated to fakes and forgeries, from stones to jewellery to coins.

What is the most interesting fake you've come across? Do you have any in your collection? What's the story behind them?

I found this on ebay that I would love to own, but it's too expensive for me at the moment (maybe after the lottery win);

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121711337603?_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Just to reassure you, I don't swap out fakes, I only take them in.

Welcome to Numista Damian.

I have an album full of modern counterfeits and contemporary forgeries for much the same reason. It's in a sinister looking black binder, which I refer to as my "Black Museum". Quality ranges from the laughable to the frighteningly accurate. The only way to learn how to spot fakes is to become used to handling them and having examples of both real and fake specimens of the same coin to compare side.

The days of cheap Chinese knock offs are over, modern high quality fakes are being produced on an industrial scale in modern factories using presses acquired from Western (US) mints (Google "The Big Tree Coin Factory"). The entire operation is condoned by a predatory regime with no regard for copyright laws or economic integrity. One of the main sources, Ali Baba is even quoted on stock exchanges. Several years ago a well known numismatic blogger / citizen journalist took several counterfeits to an international coin fair and asked the gathered top tier dealers to identify them. Their success rate was embarrassing, no better really than a bunch of kiddies making blind guesses.

Our hobby is self destructing due to mankind's basic greed and dishonesty. Collectors share the blame - if there were no buyers there would be no Ali Babas or Big Tree Coin Factories. The US Treasury and Secret Service, combined with some great common sense laws from Congress (The Hobby Protection Act) prevent the manufacturers from exporting their poison wholesale, so if the mountain won't come to Mohamed...... They wait for seedy dealers and other assorted crooks to come to them.

The rise of widespread counterfeiting is a depressing story and does little credit to anyone, from governments, to rich industrialists right down to the small scale crooks who import them a dozen at a time. Until recently there was a member of the Numista Admin Team who had a swap list full of them. The crooks are everywhere. This isn't the charming hobby of 1960's schoolboys anymore, it's a big business since the hobby became merged with "investment" and bullion coins replaced venerable coppers as the focus. Because collectors have become reliant, at least in the US, on third party grading companies to tell them if their coin is real and even what grade it might be, we have an entire generation of clueless people just lining up to be fleeced.

Any measures you can take to keep the parasites at arm's length and maintain the integrity of your collection should be embraced and encouraged.

Not in the price range of the fake you found, this one "cost" me £1.
Last year I found this £1 coin in my change, my most interesting (and most fakey) to date:


All images are from the same coin:

The reverse is the Welsh Dragon from the UK pound coins, either
1995
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces2577.html
or 2000
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces1396.html

The obverse is from a 1998 Jersey pound coin
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces4692.html

And the edge is the same as on most of the English pound coins
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces5630.html

(Originally posted here: https://en.numista.com/forum/topic42487.html)

A few months ago I bought one of these on an online auction here in Edmonton.

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces73244.html
Didn't realize it was a fake until I picked it up. (Actually one of the guys at the coin shop pointed it out to me when I went to buy a holder for it.) Made in China. Paid $30 for it but was able to sell it to a collector at the last coin show I was at. He paid me $5 for it knowing it was a fake of course. It was really well done but the effigy of the Queen was slightly off... she had a longer, broader nose on my coin. I was actually able to find a Chinese website that was selling them for about $1 each. It' no longer online. Lesson learned, I will be a lot more careful where I buy my coins from online now.

I also currently have a $2 Canadian coin that was produced in Quebec. It's very hard to tell it from a real one but when you drop it on a table it makes a flat "thud" sound instead of a high frequency ring sound that a normal toonie makes. I found it in a roll that I got from the bank! Apparently there were tens of thousands of them in circulation at one time. There is lots of info online about the whole story. Here is a link from 2006. My coin is dated 2005. Doesn't really do much good to post a picture because it looks so real.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/rcmp-find-fake-coin-factory-near-montreal-1.607555