It's a deliberately damaged surface. Please keep in mind. Not everything that looks different, strange or weird is automatically a mint error. They are so many ways coins can become damaged or altered after they leave the US Mint.
Yeah... Too bad. It didn't leave the mint like that. Who knows why people do the things that they do to poor unsuspecting coins.
I don't know if anyone deliberately ran it through whatever machine caused that damage, but yeah. Could be an accidentally damaged surface. But the fact remains that it's damaged.
Close, I'd say, but it had to have been something else, to produce those three neatly-parallel rows like that. Somebody couldn't have rolled them off so straightly with a hand tool like that. Had to have been some kind of machinery it went through. Maybe it was gear teeth, for all I know.
Coin "collectors" are becoming a dying breed. Too many "newbies" open with "...I got this strange coin, what is it worth..." We know they are not collectors.
While it's not en error, I'm always somewhat fascinated by all the different things that happen to coins both on purpose and on accident.
