As many of you know we all need to be aware if dabbling on ebay. There are now a host of new cast fakes being dribbled out onto ebay. These range from 1st and 2nd century limes, through bronze ants and on into LRB. I am collating quite a few images and will be uploading them to the Forum Fake reports. I thought it worth while sharing a few here as a quick illustration. These are all quite low quality casts but will expect to see these dribble out through uncleaned lots etc as time goes by. I have almost 100 different coins identified so far. CTG VICT LAETAE with decorated shield Constantine II - Plan of camp site Carinus Quinarius Probus - Sol from Siscia
The surfaces on most have a pocked cast look, which is distinguishable from corrosion from being buried. The lettering on legends is soft, whereas a stuck coin will generally be sharp. Casting in general does a bad job mimicking fine details.
I'd like to see the edges on these. Some of them are fairly obvious, but others are less so. I'd hope that it would be more noticeable in hand...
The artificial wear looks excellent. Would definitely have fooled me, since I’m used to LRB being in poor states of preservation
Wow, thanks for the heads up, Martin. I guess the forgers are keeping busy during the pandemic as well. At first glance, and without their "twins" (which look exact right down to the flan shape in most cases), these coins could fool some people. Still, you're right about the details not being sharp, which is definitely a red flag.
Scary. They are getting much better at preparing those "ancient" surfaces. And faking LRB's that I wouldn't've thought worth the effort.
We can report to ebay and I have. This has very little impact on them. These tend to be false accounts purporting to be in the United Kingdom / France but are in fact based in the Balkans from where everything is shipped. Identifying themselves as being in Bulgaria is too much of a red flag. The are closed down and pop up with a new account within minutes. Despite the statement above about these being Chinese I believe them to be of Bulgarian origin, which would follow previous experiences. Previously I tracked sets of "silver" denarii from Bulgaria. Now they have gone for bronze (Limes / LRB) where some of the manufacturing sins are almost the norm. Limes denarii are typically soft looking and are cast anyway so as a single item it is harder to spot a fake Limes when taken out of the context of the other fakes. They have created Limes of Matidia, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, Trajan, Septimius Severus, Julia Domna, Geta, Severus Alexander etc. The coins seem to spread across the entire range of the Imperial spectrum Tacitus, Probus, Votives, FTR, IOVI...., GENIO... on to Arcadius. If people are interested then I will add some of the images here as I process them. I will be adding them to the Forvm Fake reports for the long term too.
yes, definitely interested in seeing more of these fakes for my own education - always interested in learning...
OK. I should be able to process another few today. I will pick out a range of what I have noted so far. I try to stick to ones I have absolute evidence of (duplicates) but will also show you several that I am awaiting twins for. The same sellers are touting Celtic, Greek, Anglo-Saxon but I have not gathered those yet. I will hopefully get to them in slower time.