Neat coin club meeting last night!
Geoman
Posts: 2,491 ✭✭✭
I thought I would share what we did at our coin club last night, and maybe inspire some others to do a similar presentation. At our monthly coin club meeting, our topic was counterfeit/altered key date coins. We were able to borrow a tray of 28 counterfeit, altered or cast copied key date coins from a local dealer for discussion. What made this very interesting and educational was the fact we got a list of the counterfeit/altered date coins ahead of time, and had members bring in genuine coins of the same date to compare them to the counterfeit/altered date coins.
We first pasted around the counterfiet/altered date coins to see if we could see what was wrong. Some were pretty obvious, some were tougher. There was a few that got me - 2 in particular. One was a 1912-S Liberty Nickel in VG, that the "D" mint mark was altered into a "S". It sure looked like an "S" to me. Didn't see any tooling marks, etc. However, I found out that the dealer has changed his mind and now believes it could be a genuine 1912-S Liberty Nickel. The other was a 1932-D Washington quarter in AU. It had an added mintmark that would have fooled anyone.
We pasted around a couple of copies of the PCGS Counterfeit book as well. Then the best part was to lay a genuine coin, like a 1909-S VDB in a PCGS F-15 holder next to the counterfeit coin for comparison.
Some members were a little worried thinking about their own collection, and how good some of the counterfeits were. They are hoping they don't have any counterfeits in their own collections. But man, what a great way to study counterfeit/altered key-date coins when you can compare them side-by-side. It was a great learning experience!
We first pasted around the counterfiet/altered date coins to see if we could see what was wrong. Some were pretty obvious, some were tougher. There was a few that got me - 2 in particular. One was a 1912-S Liberty Nickel in VG, that the "D" mint mark was altered into a "S". It sure looked like an "S" to me. Didn't see any tooling marks, etc. However, I found out that the dealer has changed his mind and now believes it could be a genuine 1912-S Liberty Nickel. The other was a 1932-D Washington quarter in AU. It had an added mintmark that would have fooled anyone.
We pasted around a couple of copies of the PCGS Counterfeit book as well. Then the best part was to lay a genuine coin, like a 1909-S VDB in a PCGS F-15 holder next to the counterfeit coin for comparison.
Some members were a little worried thinking about their own collection, and how good some of the counterfeits were. They are hoping they don't have any counterfeits in their own collections. But man, what a great way to study counterfeit/altered key-date coins when you can compare them side-by-side. It was a great learning experience!
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