Fake 1893-S and 1889-CC in fake PCGS slabs. Please report.

Reported. Slabbed lol.

Unbelievable.... Cheers, RickO

Done.

I am no expert on slab labels, but when I look at the label for the 1889-CC, I see a light blue patch in the paper to the right of "MS-63", and the lettering in the grade area is mildly faint and not crisp. I have never seen that on a genuine PCGS slab.

As for fake PCGS slabs they are out there, and that's why the company has spent so much money on the new, thicker slabs that have more safety features in them.

for posterity:

GONE...good job

looks like one got pulled and the other one pulled by the seller. thats fine

I messaged the seller and asked for them to volunteer to pull and got this response.

New message from: lavineinternational (17,429YellowShooting Star)
Thank you for the information. PCGS does not seem to want to get involved, seems as if they sold their proprietary rights to some of their slabs, to the highest bidder Country and now have a huge international mess of which was started by their own actions. The rest of us will keep on losing money. We purchased over $20,000.00 from ebay in the first two months of this year of slabs, collections and single coins and found everything from single fake morgans to whole rolls of fake morgan dollars. If purchased on ebay, you can get your money back, you just need to prove everything and jump through their hoops.

Thanks for your time.

So the 1893-S XF45 above is fake and 1889-CC AU50 is real (that's where I think I see the difference in the background, the fake looks like a solid blue color, the real looks like the blue was obtained with half-tone).

The font seems to be a dead ringer... the only thing that my eye sees different about the font is the dash (-) between the year and mint mark.

However, I do think I can see the "messy" bar code on the fake and the sooth bar code on the real one. Not surprising there since the crooks likely are not using super high-end printers to print these, and there's some pretty fine details in the bar code.

@hookooekoo said:

@mbogoman said:
Just for reference sake, here's a pic of my own 1889-CC. Note the font and the bar code and compare with the fake one above.

Is it just my imagination, or is one of the simple diagnostics here is that a REAL label is printed blue using "half tone" where as the bad fakes simply use colored paper?

No, some of the earlier labels were all blue.

If you get a "thick" PCGS slab with all blue paper, that is bad.

My impression of Great Collections is that they have the expertise to spot a bad coin in a bad holder.

I think the biggest danger comes from "details holders" where a "problem coin" labeled as such which turns out to be a counterfeit. So far these seem to have been cases wher the TPGs certified counterfeit coins, but I could see these cooks putting counterfeit problem coins in their counterfeit holders.

Seller of that account hasn't sold anything in over a year. Guessing it was a hijacked account via our new friends in Russia.