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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 1172939, member: 66&quot;]There is no test to determine if a coin is &quot;really original&quot;&nbsp; That comes from experience and seeing a lot of real coins.&nbsp; Fortunately there tends to be a lot of experience here on Cointalk available for free.&nbsp; Other ways to protect yourself are to know the specifications for the coins you are buying (size and weight)&nbsp; If they are significantly off, stay away.&nbsp; As for determining if the coin is really silver, a specific gravity test is probably your best bet.&nbsp; It isn&#039;t difficult to do but it is time consuming and not something you can do at the dealers business.&nbsp; You also need to know what the fineness of the coin is supposed to be.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This sounds very suspicious.&nbsp; The Standard Catalog of World coins has the weight, usually the diameter, fineness, and actual gold or silver weight for almost every gold or silver coin back to at least 1800.&nbsp; (Unfortunately they aren&#039;t as through on the base metal coins.)&nbsp; If you are buying world coins (And since you mention European dealers I assume you are.) and you don&#039;t have a copy you need one.&nbsp; Most likely a used copy or one a couple years old will work for you just fine, just realize you will have to correct for changing bullion values.&nbsp; If you carry a netbook or possibly a tablet you should be able to get a DVD version and copy the file into the netbook or tablet.&nbsp; You can put the 19th, 20th, and 21st century files in and have over two hundred year worth of info in the palm of your hand, and in a much more transportable form than the 4800 pages of the books.&nbsp; Anyway if they are claiming that many coins don&#039;t match the weights in the catalog then you don&#039;t want to be buying from them.&nbsp; There are few countries that didn&#039;t keep close tolerances on the weights of their gold and silver coinage.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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