A couple of French counterfeits from my collection. First one is a pretty unusual contemporary countefeit - gold plated platinum. Most would have been destroyed. Spanish gold plated platinum are somewhat easier to find but the French ones are less common. This example is more unusual as it seems to be double struck, if not overstruck over a different coin. You can see some letters where it's supposed to be blank background. Still under investigation to find out what it is. The giveaway of counterfeit are the finer details and the hints of silvery underlayer at worn areas. Weights slightly less than what a genuine example is meant to be. Second one means a bit to me as this is the first counterfeit coin that I found in circulation. This is pretty obvious as the details are quite wrong. This is also magnetic. What is alarming is that the weight is right! Please feel free to post any French counterfeits!
Wikipedia has an interesting article about platinum coins. According to their article, in the early Spanish American colonies cheap platinum was fraudulently used as a substitute not only for gold but for silver.
In the 1800s, counterfeiters in South America used platinum to imitate Spanish gold escudos because platinum was abundant locally, difficult to distinguish from gold, and had little commercial value at the time. During the early 19th century, platinum was found in significant deposits in Colombia, particularly in the Chocó region. Unlike gold, which was highly prized and tightly controlled by colonial authorities, platinum was considered a nuisance metal. It was hard to melt with the technology available then, and European markets had not yet developed uses for it. As a result, platinum was cheap and readily available to counterfeiters. Its density is nearly identical to gold, which made it ideal for producing coins that matched the weight and feel of genuine Spanish escudos. Counterfeiters exploited this property by plating platinum cores with a thin layer of gold, creating coins that were visually convincing and physically accurate in weight. Since Spanish escudos circulated widely across South America and Europe, these counterfeits could pass undetected in everyday transactions. The deception was particularly effective because assayers and merchants often relied on weight and superficial appearance rather than chemical testing. In this way, platinum became a perfect substitute for gold in fraudulent coinage. The widespread use of platinum in counterfeit escudos also reflects the economic and political tensions of the colonial era. Spain’s strict control over precious metals and coinage created incentives for illicit production. Local counterfeiters undermined imperial authority while profiting from the circulation of false currency. Ironically, what was once a “worthless” nuisance metal later became one of the most valuable industrial and jewelry metals in the modern world. But in the 1800s, its role in South America was primarily as a tool for deception, cleverly used to mimic Spain’s prized gold coinage.
