I just returned from a local coin show where a wholesaler I know showed me a huge bag of silver coins from China he purchsed for resale. He was shocked to find out by his end user that the coins were counterfeit. They are made by the same groups making the trade dollars flooding the hobby. The coins were all circs and very good fakes. they way they make money off them is to use .100 silver instead of .900 the pocket the differance as these coins trade as bullion much the way US 90% does. ...........stay alert. this guy lost thousands.
I got once , from a non collector fellow , a bag of coins from Singapura , Malaysia , Bruneii , China , Mongolia. The coins of Singapura , Malaysia , Bruneii were all genuine but the 7 chinese coins and 1 silver Tugrik (1925/6) coin where suspected immidietely: A check revealed that 7 of them where conterfeits, including the Mongolian, which I already had a such real coin. Only 1 old fen was real, it is a cheap coin. I sold the 7 forged coins as forged coins to a person that knew that truth, in very cheap prices that he agreed to pay, and saved my money.
Was he a real newbie at his business, or was he just shocked that the guy he tried to peddle them to was too alert for him? Noone who has been collecting or dealing in Far Eastern crowns for more than a couple of weeks can help being aware that there are far more fakes than real ones out there. Not only are there the recent Chinese and Bulgarian forgeries, but during the heyday of such coins from the mid-19th Century to the early 20th, they were heavily counterfeited and passed off as real money. The custom of "chopmarking" such coins represents the earliest known "third party grading" of coins. Prominent merchants marked them to show that they had been inspected and found to contain the correct weight and fineness of metal. Of course, the bad guys' use of phony chopmarks led to "re-chopping", resulting in the existence of coins with 20 or more marks.
