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Well first of all, I doubt you're going to find many modern fourrées. Fourrées were a type of counterfeit that had a base metal core wrapped with silver or gold. There really isn't much of a point in doing that today (as the metal in the coin will be worth less than what it sells for, and if you're not going to make it all silver/gold, you might as well use a metal that looks precious but isn't all the way through, anyway), and I have never heard of a modern counterfeit of one of these. Ancient counterfeiters would never make a counterfeit in precious metal*, since the entire point was to use less precious metal than the legitimate currency, while it makes perfect sense for a modern counterfeiter to use such metals. Also, aside from Limes denarii, which are generally easy to spot, ancient precious metal coins were never cast,** so if you see an ancient coin that looks cast, it's probably a modern counterfeit.
In addition, many ancient counterfeits are in crude style and have numerous spelling errors that wouldn't make any sense for a modern counterfeiter to copy. For instance, I have a fourrée of Trajan that misspells the emperors name on the front, and the inscription trails off into gibberish on the back. Modern counterfeiters wouldn't make mistakes that obvious, but illiterate ancients trying to recreate coins from memory or a worn coin would. There's also the factor that many modern fakes are done in a style that's obviously wrong, but also obviously not ancient. That's something you really just need to develop an eye for. There are also databases of fakes you can look through to check coins against known fakes.
*There were some coins in India that crudely immitated Roman denarii, probably to ensure that people would think that it had the right amount of silver in it (which they actually did), but they look very crude and obviously not Roman. There are probably a few others, but in general, if it's entirely made out of a precious metal, it's not an ancient counterfeit.
**I recall reading that in some places like Gaul, they would in fact make cast fakes of sestertii. I don't know enough about them to tell you that much about how to tell them from modern casts, aside from the fact that if it's really, really crudely done, there's a decent chance that it's ancient, since modern forgers usually aren't that bad at it.
Last edited by Gao; 07-27-2009 at 06:06 PM.
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How do you know there real? 
No one knows everything & I agree to disagree at times
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