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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Barry Murphy, post: 3030678, member: 79368&quot;]Carausius said...</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;Second, NGC does NOT guaranty authenticity of ancient coins. NGC only grades ancient coins. So, NCG slabbing a coin is meaningless in this context. While I know NGC will not slab a coin that they suspect is fake, they don&#039;t, technically, authenticate.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>That&#039;s not even close to being true. 90% of my day is spent on authenticity issues. If it&#039;s in a holder, our opinion is that the coin is genuine. Ask the guy today who sent in a box of 9 coins and is getting nine coins back as forgeries if we authenticate. </p><p><br /></p><p>I would wager that a coin in an NGC holder is significantly less likely to be a forgery than any coin offered by any dealer anywhere. I believe this for 3 reasons. 1- anything that is marginal or that we are uncertain of, we don&#039;t holder. 2 - Of the 300,000 or so ancient coins that have been holdered in the last 8-9 years, I am aware of maybe a dozen that slipped through that ended up being forgeries. I can find a dozen forgeries in almost any dealer&#039;s sales any given year, and they sell far fewer coins in a year than I see in 2 months. 3 - in my opinion, 2 of the top 5 experts in the world on ancient coin forgeries work at NGC.</p><p><br /></p><p>Sear doesn&#039;t guarantee his opinion either. </p><p><br /></p><p>A dealer can guarantee a coin he sells because he has recourse with the person he purchased it from, so the only risk a dealer incurs is the profit he made on the coin. A grading service, or David Sear has no recourse with anyone, thus the insurance cost that would be involved in offering a guarantee would make the cost of holdering a coin, or in Sear&#039;s case of offering his opinion, cost prohibitive. People already send us forgeries trying to get something past us so they can post it online. It&#039;s actually a game for a number of collectors and dealers who knowing send us a few forgeries mixed in with authentic coins trying to get something past us. If we offered a financial guarantee, every forger in the world would be sending us coins just waiting for the one to slip through so he can get paid off.</p><p><br /></p><p>Barry Murphy[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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