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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dcarr, post: 2244861, member: 4781&quot;]The situation is NOT the same. We went over this issue previously in the &quot;Just got the elusive 1916 Barber Half....&quot; thread. Remember that ?</p><p><br /></p><p>The referenced FTC text was from a case where Gold Bullion International (GBI) was minting gold coins on anonymous blanks. They were using dates that were never issued for that coin type. But the pieces they produced were NOT over-struck on original coins, and so they could not be considered altered original coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is my post of note from the other thread:</p><p><br /></p><p>1)</p><p>GBI marketed their pieces as &quot;restrikes&quot;, which is a common term applied to official government re-issues of previous coins. GBI did not sufficiently indicate that their pieces were privately and recently minted. This had the effect of leading some potential buyers to believe the pieces were government minted.</p><p><br /></p><p>2)</p><p>GBI&#039;s coins were NOT over-struck on genuine pieces. They were not defaced or altered original coins. They were freshly-struck on virgin blanks. As such, they are not unlike Chinese &quot;1872&quot; US Trade Dollars, for example. (The first year for genuine US Trade Dollars was 1873).</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>The Administrative Law Judge ruled that because these coins </i>[the Gold Bullion International&#039;s German gold coins]<i> were not copies of any actual “original numismatic items” the HPA did not require them to be marked “COPY”. The Commission reversed on this point. Admitting that the replicas were neither “reproductions” nor “copies” under the HPA’s definition of “imitation numismatic items”, the Commission found that they were “counterfeits”, because “courts construing the criminal counterfeit statutes have recognized that the alleged counterfeit need only be ‘sufficiently complete to be an imitation of and to resemble the genuine article.’</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i><b>Note that the original ruling by the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) was that the GBI pieces were not copies of any &quot;original numismatic item&quot;. The FTC also agreed that they were not copies or reproductions as defined by the HPA. The FTC did contradict the ALJ, not on the basis of the HPA, but rather on the basis of U.S.C. Title 18 <i>criminal counterfeiting </i>statutes. However, U.S.C. Title 18 does not apply to my fantasy-date over-strike coins because they are not <i>counterfeits</i>, but rather altered/defaced genuine coins that are not produced for fraudulent purposes.</b></i>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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