Excellent point. Does anybody know if ANA or any of the TPG services have someone working on such a project?
Considering that the Department of Homeland Security has Customs Inspectors fairly busy looking for: 1. Nukes 2. Improvised Explosive Devices 3. Chemical Weapons 4. Heroin, Fentanyl, Cocaine and other nefarious drugs 5. Bad guys the odds of being able to sneak one of these into the country seem pretty good.
First: I'm as novice as you get. I have a 1794 cent that I bought in 1979. It's "good" at best. How prevalent were fakes back then?
Hey, welcome to CT. The only way to have pretty good assurance (nothing is 100% as far as I know) would be to have it graded and encapsulated (slabbed). Other than that, realize that this is an older post about something similar but not the same and take a picture and start your own thread here and ask opinions. BTW, here is my baby...
So what if I were to buy a box of counterfit $100 bills I knew were fake? Then I get caught with them and tell the cops I only had them to help me identify other fake notes. Oddly, that logic makes sense in the coin world. Because people know you won't try to spend the coin, as you likely would actual counterfit notes. And simply selling to someone else seems somehow less felonious.
You can buy prop money, like what they would use in a movie, but unless they can prove intent to spend it as real money, it's perfectly legal to own. However even prop money would be marked accordingly, sometimes
Luckily this was cheap enough that I felt I could do a service in buying it and keeping it out of those with hands meant for cruel intentions. This one is scary, I made a thread about it awhile back. Seller didn't know if it was real or not, and based on how cheap it was, they didnt have malicious intent. I thought it was neat. It does appear to have some silver content. And it is not one of the common fakes of the Bust Dollar. Point is, it probably came here from China. No one stopped it.
I do not own any Chinese fakes, but if I did somehow manage to come across one, I would use it as an educational piece rather than destroy it. Maybe even donate it to a coin club near me.
I wouldn't pay more than $1.65 which is what the Chinese manufacturer charges. It is definitely not one of the better fakes and does not even try to match a known variety or even the style of 1794. It is more similar to the 1795s, but not any of them either.