Gold experts...please help with authenticity

Could you gold experts please take a look? Does this look real? @jwitten

 

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How much does it weigh, and how is the reeding on the edge?

 

8.28 grams...looking now at the edge.

 

Photos not sharp enough and each is in different light so color of no help. Hard to be sure of anything. However, the coin is probably OK because you rarely encounter a counterfeit that is this beat-up!

 

Can you tell why? I want to learn. Is it because of the date?

 

NO, NO, NO !!!

I didn't think the "game" was played this way. You are a coin dealer who has been elevated to a moderator on this site. Therefore, I request that you please post the reasons for your opinion here in the public forum as it will be helpful for all of us.

Thank you in advance.

 

Sorry, but I won’t buy that issue in anything but a slab or from a reliable dealer. It’s an often-faked coin.

 

Insider Leaks

 

No sure why you would announce to the world that you are hiding information from them? Why not either post in public or just send a PM without announcing it here?

 

For the benefit of all of us, can someone please post the red flags you see on this coin?

 

Perhaps, @ToughCOINS has a point. However, @sakata is 100% correct. PM = "private message."

When ANACS was founded in the 1970's and started discovering that counterfeit and altered coins made up a huge part of their business the Director and the ANA Board of Governors had a dilemma. What to do to protect the public. The service was already sending coins back as fakes but the submitters wanted to know why they were called bad. One powerful group said to keep everything secret as the diagnostics would get back to the counterfeiters.

The other powerful group wanted ANACS to publish all the diagnostics.

Note: It turns out (possibly as Toughcoins believes) the first group was correct. Just a year later, when the ANACS instructor told about fifteen students (and no one else anywhere) how to spot a very dangerous $10 Indian fake - about two months later the identical C/F's came in with the defect removed!!! We joked that one of the counterfeiters may have been in the class.

The solution was to tell just a little. For example, I learned that NGC (and I suspect the other three) do just that even today.

Unfortunately, this debate hardly matters anymore. This is why: From what I've seen/heard in class, the best counterfeiters don't need any help as they already have been making almost perfect counterfeit coins for several years!

At this time, with the help of specialized collectors, the "perfect" counterfeits are eventually being caught. Anyway, I hope so.

 

I'd like to know too because I like gold coins. So I do collect them. I hate them in slabs too but I only buy from Provident/Apmex and hope that their due diligence is there.