How can PCGS/NGC get away with slabbing counterfeit coins?

Someone on the forum recently brought to my attention that PCGS or NGC (Not sure which one, maybe both) have been slabbing high grade russian counterfeit coins. I talked to my friend about this and he said since PCGS is listed on the NASDAQ stock market, since their shares are so high it would be devastating to people who invest in the stock market if they found out. Apparently the person who told me about this found out on coinpeople.com.

Because NGC and PCGS are American companies, they have better detection rates for Americian coins. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for foreign coins and lately many high quality Russian counterfeits are being slabbed at the moment.

Chances are, if these slabbing companes can't even detect that you've got a counterfeit if it happen to be, they might as well call it a quit.

If they are graded by NGC and PCGS, I'm not too sure who else you want to trust as they are experts on American coins, not I.

I believe PCGS will refund your money back if they are deemed to be counterfeits, which an example is shown here: http://coincollector.org/archives/002476.html

If so many American counterfeited coins were graded, major slabbing companies would have been sued and would not be allowed back into business by now.

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That link is pretty interesting. It says they've slabbed like 95 micro O morgan dollars. So, the chance they've slabbed many US counterfeits is probably slim, I'm still pretty surprised they've slabbed these russian coins. Does anyone know anymore information about it?

 

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very nice aricle. It does not surprise me that even thoughthe coins are known to be faked, that they will still be collected and traded. Even if not traded fraudulently. There are lots of numismatic items traded even after knowing they are fakes.

 

To give them some credit, they released the evidence one needs to identify one of these counterfeits. That is some value added to the community.

 

ditto

 

My bad, I thought NGC was in on it. I heard about the russian counterfeit slabbed coins through a member here who heard about it from coinpeople.com. How could this slip by them? I mean, they grade and look at thousands of coins. What do you think are the odds a coin that's been graded both by NGC and PCGS (A US one) to be counterfeit?

 

Thanks GDJMSP. My coin that I have (a saint gaudens double eagle) was graded both by PCGS and NGC.

 

Nothing's impossible of course, but by one of them I'd call it negligible, and by two of them may as well be zero. PCGS has at one time found out that some New Orleans Morgan dollars they slabbed were in fact fakes probably made about the 1940's (not designed to fool collectors, but people taking advantage of the fact that a morgan contained less than its face value in silver at the time, so they could pass them off in circulation). They basically said they wouldn't slab any more of them and offered to refund the grading fee and fair market value of the coins had they been genuine to anyone who had one of these fakes in their slab. That was a very unusual case though... the fakes were very well done and they only caught it when they saw two in the same place and realized the pattern of scratches and die cracks were precisey the same, and also that the coins turned out to actually have more than .900 silver in them (were almost pure silver in fact).

So it's not impossible, but chances are pretty much next to 0.

 

No quite true. NGC did slab 8 of them back in 1998 before they decided they were counterfiet and they immediately stopped slabbing them. It took the "Top Grading Service" another seven years to decide they they were fake. Oh and there may be even MORE of the fakes out there in the various companies slabs than they admit to. None of the services used the Micro O designation before 1998 so they can only trace the fakes they slabbed AFTER that point. Any that were slabbed before 1998 would simply be included with the rest of the regular O mint populations and not trackable.

As for them slabbing high quality counterfeits, if yoiu have a coin that can't be identified as a counterfeit, how do you know it IS a counterfeit? If nothing raises their suspicions about a coin they'll slab it. If they start getting an unusual number of something it or from an odd source, so some such then they will start looking closer and either find something that will let them identify it as a fake, or they may simply send them back as Unable to Certify.