Saw someone claiming this coin listed at an auction house was fake. I would like to know what the consensus is here on this coin. Real or fake?
I agree - but to reiterate your point that it's not settled, there can be a lot of variation between dies. Analogously sometimes old master paintings look plainly wrong and totally out of time, but have secure provenance or technical evidence that they're genuinely old.
This from a recent auction really bothered me. I went to view the sale and asked auctioneer. They just said it had 'been through their processes' and that there was a money-back guarantee of authenticity. Beware those guarantees, I say! It's extremely hard to prove that something is certainly a fake. It isn't worth the hassle of suing them, and if you did the courts would find it hard to understand the evidence. I'm not saying it's fake, but I wasn't surprised that it didn't sell.
The person who pointed it out is an expert on these types and seems to believe it is of modern style so I'm inclined to agree with him. The auction house pulled it so they seem to agree as well.
I'm not disagreeing on the specific case, and it certainly looks close to the fake die above, but experts aren't infallible and there are false positives and false negatives. Plenty of cases of experts who have devoted careers to a narrow specialty and still been caught out. There's a picture at Sotheby's tonight that looks like it was painted in the 1930s. Loads of experts have dismissed it. But it's probably a Frans Hals. Technical evidence places it securely in the seventeenth century.
"Struck from modern dies. Weight: 17.62 g is much too high and much over weight standard. Style is modern. The wreath in zeus right hand is missing! Die axis must be 12 h but not mentioned in description which die axis this fake has. I have seen die matches to these fake sold by nfs on ebay in the past but I was too lazy to add them https://www.biddr.ch/auctions/numismatiknaumann/browse?a=158&l=141774# http://forgerynetwork.com/asset.aspx?id=X2inJJxFYb0=
ehhh..could be... not a exact match for the forgery but very close. it just doesn't "look" ancient made nor old.
