@oldUScoins said:
It’s a really good question. I think it would drive the prices up for coins that have a know Provence and can be tracked back through major collections or auction records.
Maybe. Although it is more likely that the price of the 99.9% of coins that have no provenance would simply crater due to a sudden supply glut.
Could explain the downturn of this last decade.
The whole worlds off its rocker, buy Gold™.
BOOMIN!™
Wooooha! Did someone just say it's officially "TACO™" Tuesday????
@lkeigwin said:
If the question really is "What happens when counterfeits are so good that they cannot be detected?" then the answer is simple. If they cannot be detected then they are the same as genuine.
Most of the posts here debate the premise. Or, said another way, they are addressing the question "Can counterfeits be so good they cannot be detected?".
Lance.
Took the words outta my mouth. If it can't be detected then who said its a counterfeit?
I have had this same discussion with members of my group...
The following are three 1806 "C-1" half cents. all in TPG holders (images are cropped) as genuine straight graded XF-45's. They all have several common marks including the gash on the "A" of HALF which is not seen on any other known C-1.
Are they now their own genuine die state or variety?
Wow...not sure what to say on this one. Maybe some of the sperts can comment.
Sadly unless people buy Certified coins (For me -PCGS preferred) they may be ripped. A guy in coin club bought some ASE from China which came in nice capsules. They were all fake.
What if an engine goes out on a 737 at takeoff? It may crash. Watch the show Air Disasters you will be amazed at what all can go wrong and cause a crash.
But certified PCGS Coins
Practice common sense (don’t buy from questionable sources).
PCGS assigns a TrueView picture to a Cert# that I can look at while holding the coin.
I can select tiny imperfections that can't be reproduced by any known means to identify the coin.
AND...They guarantee that the coin is genuine in MONEY.
To my knowledge, they won't guarantee coins in older holders with obsolete security safeguards.
As it should be.
@ReadyFireAim said:
PCGS assigns a TrueView picture to a Cert# that I can look at while holding the coin.
I can select tiny imperfections that can't be reproduced by any known means to identify the coin.
AND...They guarantee that the coin is genuine in MONEY.
To my knowledge, they won't guarantee coins in older holders with obsolete security safeguards.
As it should be.
Did you actually mean that you don’t think PCGS guarantees certain PCGS coins in some of their older holders (with “obsolete security safeguards”) ? If so, which ones? I have not heard of that before.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
@ReadyFireAim said:
PCGS assigns a TrueView picture to a Cert# that I can look at while holding the coin.
I can select tiny imperfections that can't be reproduced by any known means to identify the coin.
AND...They guarantee that the coin is genuine in MONEY.
To my knowledge, they won't guarantee coins in older holders with obsolete security safeguards.
As it should be.
Did you actually mean that you don’t think PCGS guarantees certain PCGS coins in some of their older holders (with “obsolete security safeguards”) ? If so, which ones? I have not heard of that before.
PCGS guarantees the authenticity of all of their genuine holdered coins.
@ReadyFireAim said:
PCGS assigns a TrueView picture to a Cert# that I can look at while holding the coin.
I can select tiny imperfections that can't be reproduced by any known means to identify the coin.
AND...They guarantee that the coin is genuine in MONEY.
To my knowledge, they won't guarantee coins in older holders with obsolete security safeguards.
As it should be.
Did you actually mean that you don’t think PCGS guarantees certain PCGS coins in some of their older holders (with “obsolete security safeguards”) ? If so, which ones? I have not heard of that before.
PCGS guarantees the authenticity of all of their genuine holdered coins.
I believe the same. Hence my previous post.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
Have you ever seen the documentary Sour Grapes a lot of rich people who don’t know anything about coins are going to end up with safes full of fakes to go with there cellars full of fake wine
If the counterfeiters get THAT good and those coins get into TPG plastic, it's basically the death of rare coin collecting as we know it. It would be insidious at first... populations of certain rare coins that have premiums over melt would miraculously start to increase. As populations start to increase, prices come down. At some point, they'll just be worth gold or silver spot...
Collecting: Dansco 7070; Middle Date Large Cents (VF-AU); Box of 20;
@lkenefic said:
If the counterfeiters get THAT good and those coins get into TPG plastic, it's basically the death of rare coin collecting as we know it. It would be insidious at first... populations of certain rare coins that have premiums over melt would miraculously start to increase. As populations start to increase, prices come down. At some point, they'll just be worth gold or silver spot...
You speak as if this hasn't already begun to happen?
The whole worlds off its rocker, buy Gold™.
BOOMIN!™
Wooooha! Did someone just say it's officially "TACO™" Tuesday????
That is where provenance will make a difference. Of course the vast majority won’t have one but don’t need one. It’s unlikely someone will flood the market with most of the collectible coins out there. I’d say coins valued at <$1000 would largely be safe by being already generally available and “affordable”
I have friends in the early copper field who state provenance is everything!
As far as the counterfeits getting "THAT good" I guess the OP's definition is that they are not detected. The 3 1806 half cents I imaged above are all in TPG genuine plastic so they got past that level of "authenticity", but a group of us have been able to prove them counterfeits along with a large number of other denominations and varieties from a low grade Massachusetts half cent to a group of 1836 Gobrecht dollars with each having at least one in a genuine TPG holder. So in the past several years we may have moved to the brink of his question as technology continues to improve, and we don't know what we don't know...
@Insider2 - I was under the impression you were Fazzari…
@Elcontador said:
When I was in Vietnam, I bought an 1875 CC Trade $. It looked legit, but I thought it was a fake, and bought it anyway. It would have graded in the high VF or low XF range. It fooled everyone. Until someone asked whether he could drop it on a concrete floor and listen to the metal's 'ping.' That gave it away as a fake. If the counterfeiter used to proper metallic content when making this coin, the coin would be in a first world TPG slab. And no one would be the wiser, because it's not an expensive coin and would have flown under the radar.
I’ll share pics of a NGC slabbed coin i have that i believe is counterfeit.
@burfle23 said:
I have friends in the early copper field who state provenance is everything!
If I was PCGS, I'd pull the guarantee on anything w/o a TrueView & start keeping much better track of provenance to include years of ownership in every public registry set. (to be made private if the current owner wishes)
@burfle23 said:
I have friends in the early copper field who state provenance is everything!
If I was PCGS, I'd pull the guarantee on anything w/o a TrueView & start keeping much better track of provenance to include years of ownership in every public registry set. (to be made private if the current owner wishes)
I am trying to understand your rationale here...
The guarantee of authenticity should be on each and every coin certified and encapsulated period in my mind. How do you delete a warranty after the fact that was paid for?
And are you implying that TrueView certified/ image coins can't be counterfeit? Mistakes can be made and the guarantee protects the owner from that...
I thought I would post this example in comparison to the three I posted above; again, it is in a top TPG holder as genuine.
What is different (it has many of the matching attribution marks) is the "cut" at the "A" has been attempted to be repaired in the dies and the result is the "plugged A variety". I have 4 of these in my collection and designated 2 different "die states" in my EAC Penny-Wise article. In an alternate reality these would be a new genuine die state or variety!
This example even has die bounce doubling of the date- what a touch of "authenticity"...
@burfle23 said:
The guarantee of authenticity should be on each and every coin certified and encapsulated period in my mind. How do you >delete a warranty after the fact that was paid for?
Unless there is a high resolution picture of the coin as it passes QA, how would the TPG, know for sure the coin was the same one they put in there?
If your holder has been compromised, the warranty is void.
Who determines if the holder has been messed with?
And are you implying that TrueView certified/ image coins can't be counterfeit? Mistakes can be made and the guarantee >protects the owner from that...
Nope, but I can prove that the coin in the holder is the one in the picture that was guarenteed to be genuine.
You don't have to pay for the warranty again when you re-holder it.
@lkeigwin said:
If the question really is "What happens when counterfeits are so good that they cannot be detected?" then the answer is simple. If they cannot be detected then they are the same as genuine.
Most of the posts here debate the premise. Or, said another way, they are addressing the question "Can counterfeits be so good they cannot be detected?".
Lance.
Took the words outta my mouth. If it can't be detected then who said its a counterfeit?
In my lifetime, eventually all counterfeit US coins are detected - eventually. I just finished reading a four inch thick book on counterfeit Territorial gold coins in the market from the 60's and 70's that went undetected, THEY WERE GENUINE until detected.
Here's the thing guys, Eventually, making a counterfeit die of the quality shown above is going to be so cheap (if not already) that the counterfeiters only need to make a very few coins. If they only made six of those coins in mid grade and tossed the fake dies, they would go undetected for a long time. It IS ONLY through the efforts of @burfle23 and is internet watchdog group (guys with no life like me - LOL) that these were even detected AT ALL so quickly! The counterfeits showing up in the 21st Century are amazing!
Authentication will need to be moving into the 50X+ range of magnification with spectrographic analysis. You can trust me on this as In the 1980's I told students that the "days of the hand lens of authentication ARE OVER!" It is nearing the end for the 40X stereo microscope right now. If only we knew to be recording the surfaces and metal content of coins using very high powers of magnification even thirty years ago; IMHO, the very deceptive fakes we are seeing now would be considered as crude as the poor fake fooling most folks forty -five years ago. Well, we did not.
@lkeigwin said:
If the question really is "What happens when counterfeits are so good that they cannot be detected?" then the answer is simple. If they cannot be detected then they are the same as genuine.
Most of the posts here debate the premise. Or, said another way, they are addressing the question "Can counterfeits be so good they cannot be detected?".
Lance.
Took the words outta my mouth. If it can't be detected then who said its a counterfeit?
In my lifetime, eventually all counterfeit US coins are detected - eventually.
That’s an improbable statement since we don’t know what we don’t know. The only way to really know this is to have a catalog from the counterfeiters.
I'll repeat what I posted. In my lifetime, eventually all counterfeit US coins are detected - eventually."
@Zoins replied: "That’s an improbable statement since we don’t know what we don’t know. The only way to really know this is to have a catalog from the counterfeiters."
LOL. It may seem improbable to you because our time on this earth (lifetime) may be vastly different and you are not in the counterfeit detection business. Perhaps you are and I'm just mistaken.
Good point! That's how all the fake territorial coins/bars were, They just "turned-up" out of the blue with folks "in the know" pushing them as genuine (knowingly or unknowingly at first). That way they became accepted for years.
Pick any expert - lets say the top expert on Tops Baseball cards. His word would be "law" to many and if he were in the printing business...
FUN FACT: He who knows most about something makes the best counterfeits. In the 1970's Hoskins and myself joked that if we went to Lebanon, we could aid them to make "undetectable" gold fakes! The reason their product look like crude casts (opinion of the experts at the time) was because the counterfeiters knew nothing about U.S. Mint die steel, annealing temps, press settings, etc. They had the same press as used at the Mint.
Does finding a rare coin in a 200 year old safe count as a provenance or is that only true on eBay?
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
@lkenefic said:
If the counterfeiters get THAT good and those coins get into TPG plastic, it's basically the death of rare coin collecting as we know it. It would be insidious at first... populations of certain rare coins that have premiums over melt would miraculously start to increase. As populations start to increase, prices come down. At some point, they'll just be worth gold or silver spot...
You speak as if this hasn't already begun to happen?
Of course it has begun to happen. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not THAT ill-informed. It just seems to be more contained to higher end coins rather that $50-75 middle of the road collector coins. If something like common date Seated quarters in VG-VF grades start getting commonly counterfeited... it's done.
Collecting: Dansco 7070; Middle Date Large Cents (VF-AU); Box of 20;
Counterfeiter Mark Hoffman once said that if he could make a coin that could not be detected from the real thing, then for all intents and purposes it is real. Not a truism, but is hard to argue with that. Unfortunately.
@lkenefic said:
If the counterfeiters get THAT good and those coins get into TPG plastic, it's basically the death of rare coin collecting as we know it. It would be insidious at first... populations of certain rare coins that have premiums over melt would miraculously start to increase. As populations start to increase, prices come down. At some point, they'll just be worth gold or silver spot...
You speak as if this hasn't already begun to happen?
Of course it has begun to happen. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not THAT ill-informed. It just seems to be more contained to higher end coins rather that $50-75 middle of the road collector coins. If something like common date Seated quarters in VG-VF grades start getting commonly counterfeited... it's done.
This is the list I gave to Secret Service in a meeting in DC in 2018:
PCGS does issue the result "Authenticity Unverifiable" which isn't exactly the same thing. I'm guessing many will treat that as "counterfeit until proven otherwise."
PCGS does issue the result "Authenticity Unverifiable" which isn't exactly the same thing. I'm guessing many will treat that as "counterfeit until proven otherwise."
Agreed; I have had a couple of "environmentally challenged" large cents marked as that and then slabbed as genuine after a PCGS review.
@burfle23 said:
This is the list I gave to Secret Service in a meeting in DC in 2018:
THANKS!
Note this is a list of the "State-of-the-Art" fakes known at this time. It does not include the much less deceptive junk that fools most collectors and many dealers. No telling what is still out there waiting to be discovered!
Comments
Could explain the downturn of this last decade.
The whole worlds off its rocker, buy Gold™.
BOOMIN!™
Wooooha! Did someone just say it's officially "TACO™" Tuesday????
Wow...not sure what to say on this one. Maybe some of the sperts can comment.
Sadly unless people buy Certified coins (For me -PCGS preferred) they may be ripped. A guy in coin club bought some ASE from China which came in nice capsules. They were all fake.
What if an engine goes out on a 737 at takeoff? It may crash. Watch the show Air Disasters you will be amazed at what all can go wrong and cause a crash.
PCGS assigns a TrueView picture to a Cert# that I can look at while holding the coin.
I can select tiny imperfections that can't be reproduced by any known means to identify the coin.
AND...They guarantee that the coin is genuine in MONEY.
To my knowledge, they won't guarantee coins in older holders with obsolete security safeguards.
As it should be.
My Saint Set
All three are counterfeit- maybe a new reality!
Did you actually mean that you don’t think PCGS guarantees certain PCGS coins in some of their older holders (with “obsolete security safeguards”) ? If so, which ones? I have not heard of that before.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
PCGS guarantees the authenticity of all of their genuine holdered coins.
I believe the same. Hence my previous post.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
Have you ever seen the documentary Sour Grapes a lot of rich people who don’t know anything about coins are going to end up with safes full of fakes to go with there cellars full of fake wine
https://www.pcgs.com/setregistry/quarters/washington-quarters-major-sets/washington-quarters-date-set-circulation-strikes-1932-present/publishedset/209923
https://www.pcgs.com/setregistry/quarters/washington-quarters-major-sets/washington-quarters-date-set-circulation-strikes-1932-present/album/209923
If the counterfeiters get THAT good and those coins get into TPG plastic, it's basically the death of rare coin collecting as we know it. It would be insidious at first... populations of certain rare coins that have premiums over melt would miraculously start to increase. As populations start to increase, prices come down. At some point, they'll just be worth gold or silver spot...
Successful BST transactions with: SilverEagles92; Ahrensdad; Smitty; GregHansen; Lablade; Mercury10c; copperflopper; whatsup; KISHU1; scrapman1077, crispy, canadanz, smallchange, robkool, Mission16, ranshdow, ibzman350, Fallguy, Collectorcoins, SurfinxHI, jwitten, Walkerguy21D, dsessom.
You speak as if this hasn't already begun to happen?
The whole worlds off its rocker, buy Gold™.
BOOMIN!™
Wooooha! Did someone just say it's officially "TACO™" Tuesday????
That is where provenance will make a difference. Of course the vast majority won’t have one but don’t need one. It’s unlikely someone will flood the market with most of the collectible coins out there. I’d say coins valued at <$1000 would largely be safe by being already generally available and “affordable”
I have friends in the early copper field who state provenance is everything!
As far as the counterfeits getting "THAT good" I guess the OP's definition is that they are not detected. The 3 1806 half cents I imaged above are all in TPG genuine plastic so they got past that level of "authenticity", but a group of us have been able to prove them counterfeits along with a large number of other denominations and varieties from a low grade Massachusetts half cent to a group of 1836 Gobrecht dollars with each having at least one in a genuine TPG holder. So in the past several years we may have moved to the brink of his question as technology continues to improve, and we don't know what we don't know...
@Insider2 - I was under the impression you were Fazzari…
I’ll share pics of a NGC slabbed coin i have that i believe is counterfeit.
If I was PCGS, I'd pull the guarantee on anything w/o a TrueView & start keeping much better track of provenance to include years of ownership in every public registry set. (to be made private if the current owner wishes)
My Saint Set
I am trying to understand your rationale here...
The guarantee of authenticity should be on each and every coin certified and encapsulated period in my mind. How do you delete a warranty after the fact that was paid for?
And are you implying that TrueView certified/ image coins can't be counterfeit? Mistakes can be made and the guarantee protects the owner from that...
I thought I would post this example in comparison to the three I posted above; again, it is in a top TPG holder as genuine.
What is different (it has many of the matching attribution marks) is the "cut" at the "A" has been attempted to be repaired in the dies and the result is the "plugged A variety". I have 4 of these in my collection and designated 2 different "die states" in my EAC Penny-Wise article. In an alternate reality these would be a new genuine die state or variety!
This example even has die bounce doubling of the date- what a touch of "authenticity"...
Unless there is a high resolution picture of the coin as it passes QA, how would the TPG, know for sure the coin was the same one they put in there?
If your holder has been compromised, the warranty is void.
Who determines if the holder has been messed with?
Nope, but I can prove that the coin in the holder is the one in the picture that was guarenteed to be genuine.
You don't have to pay for the warranty again when you re-holder it.
My Saint Set
In my lifetime, eventually all counterfeit US coins are detected - eventually. I just finished reading a four inch thick book on counterfeit Territorial gold coins in the market from the 60's and 70's that went undetected, THEY WERE GENUINE until detected.
Here's the thing guys, Eventually, making a counterfeit die of the quality shown above is going to be so cheap (if not already) that the counterfeiters only need to make a very few coins. If they only made six of those coins in mid grade and tossed the fake dies, they would go undetected for a long time. It IS ONLY through the efforts of @burfle23 and is internet watchdog group (guys with no life like me - LOL) that these were even detected AT ALL so quickly! The counterfeits showing up in the 21st Century are amazing!
Authentication will need to be moving into the 50X+ range of magnification with spectrographic analysis. You can trust me on this as In the 1980's I told students that the "days of the hand lens of authentication ARE OVER!" It is nearing the end for the 40X stereo microscope right now. If only we knew to be recording the surfaces and metal content of coins using very high powers of magnification even thirty years ago; IMHO, the very deceptive fakes we are seeing now would be considered as crude as the poor fake fooling most folks forty -five years ago. Well, we did not.
Did the TPGs retroactively remove or limit guarantees for copper and milk spots?
That’s an improbable statement since we don’t know what we don’t know. The only way to really know this is to have a catalog from the counterfeiters.
I'll repeat what I posted. In my lifetime, eventually all counterfeit US coins are detected - eventually."
@Zoins replied: "That’s an improbable statement since we don’t know what we don’t know. The only way to really know this is to have a catalog from the counterfeiters."
LOL. It may seem improbable to you because our time on this earth (lifetime) may be vastly different and you are not in the counterfeit detection business. Perhaps you are and I'm just mistaken.
AFAIK, yes.
It's really interesting that many top coins don't seem to have published provenance.
I was just looking at this top pop PCGS MS67+ Stella, and there's no provenance listed.
https://www.pcgs.com/cert/20371296
Good point! That's how all the fake territorial coins/bars were, They just "turned-up" out of the blue with folks "in the know" pushing them as genuine (knowingly or unknowingly at first). That way they became accepted for years.
Pick any expert - lets say the top expert on Tops Baseball cards. His word would be "law" to many and if he were in the printing business...
FUN FACT: He who knows most about something makes the best counterfeits. In the 1970's Hoskins and myself joked that if we went to Lebanon, we could aid them to make "undetectable" gold fakes! The reason their product look like crude casts (opinion of the experts at the time) was because the counterfeiters knew nothing about U.S. Mint die steel, annealing temps, press settings, etc. They had the same press as used at the Mint.
Does finding a rare coin in a 200 year old safe count as a provenance or is that only true on eBay?
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
Of course it has begun to happen. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not THAT ill-informed. It just seems to be more contained to higher end coins rather that $50-75 middle of the road collector coins. If something like common date Seated quarters in VG-VF grades start getting commonly counterfeited... it's done.
Successful BST transactions with: SilverEagles92; Ahrensdad; Smitty; GregHansen; Lablade; Mercury10c; copperflopper; whatsup; KISHU1; scrapman1077, crispy, canadanz, smallchange, robkool, Mission16, ranshdow, ibzman350, Fallguy, Collectorcoins, SurfinxHI, jwitten, Walkerguy21D, dsessom.
Counterfeiter Mark Hoffman once said that if he could make a coin that could not be detected from the real thing, then for all intents and purposes it is real. Not a truism, but is hard to argue with that. Unfortunately.
This is the list I gave to Secret Service in a meeting in DC in 2018:
I wonder how much they have to make per month to make this type of operation worthwhile.
Authentic until proven otherwise.
No Way Out: Stimulus and Money Printing Are the Only Path Left
PCGS does issue the result "Authenticity Unverifiable" which isn't exactly the same thing. I'm guessing many will treat that as "counterfeit until proven otherwise."
Agreed; I have had a couple of "environmentally challenged" large cents marked as that and then slabbed as genuine after a PCGS review.
THANKS!
Note this is a list of the "State-of-the-Art" fakes known at this time. It does not include the much less deceptive junk that fools most collectors and many dealers. No telling what is still out there waiting to be discovered!