How do graders spot counterfeits?

Yes they did, but they were also only getting a few thousand coins a month in the "old days", not a quarter million or more like the TPG's do now.

 

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Good point, while they weighed each coin individually, They batched the images using a 2X2 format. I've seen negatives form the "old days" with 7 coins on each. I sure would like to have that collection of negatives. I'll bet it was sold with the company - at least twice.

 

A lot of good information, thanks to all of you. Below is a picture of a coin I bought recently and I posted in a question "Is this a doubled die or what?". I now believe it is what is called a contemporary counterfeit. It appears to have plenty of circulation and wear, most likely in India way back when. I will keep it to remind me to look more carefully and to trust that gut feeling when something just doesn't look right.

 

Wow, even then they were messing around with the very coins in circulation. I may just be extrapolating from that particular circumstance and taking off from there into admittedly unproven territory, but it really does seem to me as if there hasn't been a time in history when someone or other would rather do just about anything else to avoid having to do even a semblance of an honest day's work. By the way, so very sorry that what you originally thought was a straightforward lovely piece of authentic (and very artistic at that) work turned out to be a forgery. On the other hand, and here I'm offering the option of looking at the glass half full, as a piece of coinage history, whether a legitimate one or not, it does have a rather interesting story to tell.

 

The "key" to this one is the crude shape of the letters and design. They did a decent job on the head. Looks like an old fake struck with hand-cut dies and a good prize for a counterfeit collection or British India collector!

 

Yes indeed, this is absolutely, positively a perfect no-lose situation, because either way this is a heck of a collector's item!

 

When the ANA sold ANACS to Amos Press the negatives did NOT go with it. The ANA should still have them, but whether or not they could be located might be another matter.

 

Sounds fishy, they better have them!

 

They're wherever they left their car keys.

 

Oct 27,2017...More on counterfeit coins...maybe need a separate thread??

http://www.dcpresswire.com/2017/10/...-action-on-counterfeit-gold-and-silver-coins/

 

It's encouraging to read that these two congressmen are holding the PM coin counterfeiting problems up to the light of examination, but it's simultaneously disheartening to know that a push from Congress is necessary due to neither the Secret Service nor the U.S. Mint apparently doing much of anything to be alert and pro-active in attempting to meet this problem head-on.

 

I know you asked about TPG's but you should start learning on your own.
PCGS had a video series on Learning Counterfeit Detection but I don't known if it's still available. (You can check).
Also, Coin World runs a feature article on detecting counterfeits by Michael Fahey. He's a Senior Numismatist at ANACS. That can get you started on learning what to look for re counterfeit coins

 

All the PCGS videos are on YouTube.

 

About the article on Congress starting to initiate action on counterfeits ..... That subcommittee was in touch with, and got direction from, Mike Marshal from up here in Canada to find out how he was able to stop Chinese counterfeits from being bought and sold. Mike took it upon himself to try to do something since the Royal Canadian Mint and government would do nothing. Mike and the single Canadian Mountie responsible for overseeing the Canadian govt counterfeiting enforcement were able to get an "in" at Ebay thru Paypal. They put the screws to Paypal because that was where the money transfer was really taking place with the open exchange of selling. Starting with Paypal's recommendations, Ebay would remove any auction available in Canada that was reported to be fake/counterfeit and they did. To thank Mike for giving them the "hows and whys" of how they accomplished what he did, Congress sent him a nice check and huge thank-yous. Unfortunately, up here, the Mountie that was involved was transferred to the West Coast from Ottawa and the RCMP dedicated interest in the program died with his transfer. Mike (and now with a few other's help" still contact Ebay on a daily basis to remove counterfeit coins.

Not just the US Mint stuff, but now Canadian silver and gold Maple Leafs are being copied and they are getting quite good .. no more crude portraits or porous castings like 5-10 years ago. Now with lasers and Cad-Cam actually making dies using actual coins to be traced/copied, things get very tricky trying to see the good from the bad. Since they use an actual coin for the computer to read and then fed to the laser cutter making the dies, all the fakes will have the same anomalies that the real coin had .. so any die cracks, nicks, dings, etc will be copied so that all the fakes will show any signs of post-mint damage that was on the real one. The computers also don't pick up the hairlines of the portraits fully, age cracks or corner eye -wrinkles are sometimes weak and the transition with the bridge of the nose is sometime not quite right. Since they (the counterfeiters) are not numismatists, they also sometimes have an Obverse-Reverse marriage that never was made. The fakes coming out in the last 2 years are getting REALLY good and it takes good eyes and a good scale to sometimes find them.

If any of my comments in this posting were covered in an earlier part of this thread, I apolgize, but I didn't feel like reading 5 pages of content.

 

Mike was able to put the screws to ebay up in Canada because under Canadian law selling fakes, even marked copies or marked replicas is illegal and since ebay and paypal were facilitating the slae of illegal items they could be held responsible. Technically since the revision of the HPA ebay could be held legally responsible for selling unmarked fakes in the US as well. (Marked fakes are legal.)

 

In Canada, it is illegal to even POSSESS a counterfeit or fake coin, let alone sell one. That's how we are able to have auctioneers remove items from sale, unless they are clearly marked as "copy" or "reproduction"

 

Yes, but I have a lot of fun with people when they tell me ASEs are .999 Fine and I ask them to show me where it says that. I know that when Congress passed the law starting the wheels rolling that the legislation said they had to have some copper added, something like 0.07% or so because they thought adding copper would make them harder so that they'd wear better. Idiots! That's probably the reason they didn't put .999 FINE SILVER on them.