Just saw the story on coinflation, and would warn any silver buyers of these being on the market, as well as the fake ASE boxes in the story. http://numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=25621 Moral is, with relatively higher prices no physical purchase is absolutely safe unless you know what you are doing. Be careful guys.
Yes sir, I remembered it, but these are "new" on the market. The article states they first showed up in FL recently. Just passing along newer developments.
Well, they aren't fake US coins, so they themselves would not be illegal. If you attempted to sell the fake as a real one that would be simple fraud, but since they are only tokens there is no law save maybe copyright that would make them illegal. My question is why would they go through all of this work and still make them half a gram underweight? Seems to me it would be easy to slip a little lead in the mix and make them perfect weight. I am sure that will in the new and improved version 2.0 fakes.
It's amusing to me that people always mention the illegality of stamping out fake pandas and other coins. Of course trying to pass faked coins is illegal. But that won't stop crooks from doing it. there's some fake prospectors that are pretty close weight wise. What a lot of them do nowadays is to put the fake in an airtite, whether gold or silver. Because the airtite hides any abnormal thickness and weight differences are less likely to be noticed.
Not sure i follow you can open an air tite very easily so what is point of doing that? In fact if it abnormally thick it won't fit correctly into the airtite (since for example H40 are designed for ASE and if the fake ASE is too thick the airtite will not close) and diameter has to spot as well to fit into direct fit air tite. You are just wasting it on fake lead coin which probably cost less to make than the air tite.
^ They're counting on the buyer being too lazy to crack them because upon visual inspection, it appears to be legit. Whereas if they ship the coins naked, it's pretty apparent that they're fake because they're too thick. To make money, they don't need to fool everyone, just some people. And putting them in airtites increases that %. Because in the back of some people's minds, they'll think that the crooks won't bother putting it in an airtite or sealing it in plastic if it's fake. I happen to have a fair number of fakes sitting on my desk, and nowadays, they're all shipping in airtites.
You always have to do your due diligence when you buy a coin but my bigger concern are fake coins in real mint packaging and legit CoA which can fool anyone. Lot of large dealers' even profit from selling these boxes and CoA (since they sent the coin to get slabbed its pure profit for them) in ebay which often end up used for counterfeit coins.
Most often not when people see CoA and legit mint material they assume the coin is real and with some of the fake Chinese silver issues' the weight is almost on par with real deal. Unless you closely verify the strike and image real closely you are going to tell them apart. The seller in fact will eagerly refund you the money including shipping if you don't like it and simply re-list it again.
