Yes, I have heard this, and will be sure to stop looking at the PCGS girls long enough to look at the dies as well.
yeah make sure you focus ont he girls i dont need competetion the classic comem coin is al thats left to go for
Spock, The PCGS booth is usually stragegically placed across from the Heritage booth at LB in order to distract you during lot viewing.
i know so i dont go to shows anymore where coins for the "spock collection" have to be obtained. I went to the chicago show and ended up with 3 Indian coins worth $30. granted those were a steal but i lost a 2 rupee 8 anna india note and coins worth $10k at the auction. it was a funny story i go for lot viewing and a lil kid comes running to me and tells me those coins are going away and i ask him where and he shows me the tv screen there. i lost half the coins while i was looking at them and then i say i must rush home before the other lots end by the time i got nothing next week the note dealer told me that he had sold the note for a thousand bucks ( at the show he had it marked for 400)
In the September 2008 issue of World Coin News (front page) the rest of the article appears. To summarize: The counterfeit dies were bought from a seller in China on an on-line auction (eBay?) along with an album containing 80 fake coins known as "Chinese Ackey". ("An ackey is a silver coin minted in England in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries and intended for use in parts of Africa, thus the use of the term here indicates a different application, possibly indicative of the coins' illegitimate status.") The counterfeiters appear to be using their dies until they are worn out. By selling the worn out dies the counterfeiter makes a little more money. PCGS is building a reference collection of counterfeit coins (of which these fake coins and dies will be a part). At the Long Beach Show you can see these counterfeit coins and dies on display at the PCGS booth #807. An educational exhibit of selected items from the PCGS Grading Set will be on display in Room 101-B.
It's been posted before but given this thread it might be helpful to post it again. To see some of these click here - Chinese Fakes - scroll down a bit.
Hmmm, maybe I should consider a job at PCGS in the future? That's neat that they are doing that, thanks for sharing Hobo. :thumb: Phoenix
Ebay doesn't bother the big Chinese power sellers.... maybe they have dimplomatic immunity. So the influx of forgeries continues at a record pace.
It's scary how good the Chinese got , before there was usually something that gave a counterfeit away , now some of the dies are good enough to fool an expert with a loupe . Now you need 30 power microscopes , and other sophisticated devises to tell the fakes apart . I took a Trade Dollar to the man who wrote the Coin World article on Chinese fakes , after comparing mine to several slabbed pieces , he told me though there was nothing he could see that would point it to be a counterfeit , Though he wouldn't authenticate it without further testing , his reason was there was something about the field that didn't look right . The coin weighed in tolerence . rzage
I took a 1802 dollar that I got from our Chinese friend to a local dealer... it was one of those 90% silver jobs, complete with edge lettering and gunked up enough to look genuine. After weighing it, examining it with a loupe for five minutes, giving it the old "ring" test, he declared it genuine... even making the point that it had been "in the ground" for a long time. He wanted to send it off for grading before I gave him the bad news. I've since used metal stamps to mark "copy" on the reverse of the dozen or so "example" coins I've obtained. But you're right... they're getting better, the coinage is getting more diverse, the "copy" stamp is missing and the volume is soaring. Somewhere there's an answer... I just don't know where.
Now think of someone without your ethics in the same situation , the greed of easy money sets in and he sells it to the dealer without a second thought , now if it's a lesser coin than a 1802 dollar and he doesn't send it off for verifacation , he's gonna sell it thinking it's legit , the buyer will think it's legit now it's in our hobby . Multiply that by 1000s every week and imagine all the fakes out there . The only thing we can do is educate ourselves or buy slabs . rzage
