Dangerously Deceptive

That does not look like a casting seam, but those are some terrible looking stars.

 

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Excellent and informative detective work!

 

I would have seen the vampire hub marks on the obverse neck, the grainy, "lucky charms mushy" reverse, and the "circulated gray" color and quickly taken my finger off the "Place Bid" button. But then I already got my free CoinTalk counterfeit lesson here with this coin...

 

Fascinating thread. Thanks for sharing the images and analysis.

 

Im just the opposite. If it's cheap enough, like dirt cheep, I will go in on it, knowing well that it is fake. Like this one. I knew i wanted it right away, because it is pretty deceptive. There might be a lot of fakes on ebay but it is hard to find them this good. Pieces like these are just different to me, because they dont look like your typical Chinese "play" money. This one has some dark true criminal intent to defraud somebody. I guess for me it's the mystery that surrounds it.

It's fake but yet I already like it more than most of my collection, for now anyways

 

Excellent!

Thank you

 

I share your sentiment that fakes are worth buying when cheap enough. I don't think this one is very deceptive or hard to spot for an advanced collector or even intermediate collector when looking at the photos full size, but still dangerous.

 

Thank you very much for the photos and analysis - very informative!

 

Thank you for this educational post. Very informative, and a little scary that there are many "almost accurate" fakes out there.

 

Does this seem like open field to collect? The best and worst of fakes? Back in the 60's I found 3 counterfit Walking haves in rolls from the bank, all different, dated in the 20's. One was puter cast, very poor, and very worn after 40 years in circulation.

 

This certainly seems to be an expanding field. Good thing too, as it will contribute to making collectors more knowledgeable on fakes.
Many contemporary counterfeits are much more rare than their genuine counterparts and actually sell for much more.

 

Sure... contemporary counterfeits suffered all the same attrition as genuine coins. Of which sometimes less than 1 in 1000 survive today. Plus if the counterfeit was detected they were destroyed. And the dies used rarely had the same life as genuine dies.

Put it all together and it's not unheard of for a contemporary counterfeit to be known by a handful of examples while survival of the real coin is in the 100s or 1000s.

 

Very interesting...and to his credit, Mike Mezak says "it's the wild West out there!"