Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kaparthy, post: 487903, member: 57463&quot;]<b>Fakes and Frauds: Threat or Menace?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>At the 2004 ANA convention in Pittsburgh, I spoke at the Numismatic Theatre on the subject of &quot;Fakes, Frauds and Phonies: Threat or Menace?&quot; For my talk, I went to coin dealers and borrowed coins that they &quot;ate.&quot;&nbsp; I then passed them around.&nbsp; Knowing that these were fakes, other dealers in the audience could not always agree on the telltale.&nbsp; Sometimes, it was the Mint mark that turns a $20 Morgan into a $120 Morgan -- and who pays attention to those, anyway?&nbsp; I had five fake Seated Dollars, VF/XF.&nbsp; The dealers agreed that if one of these was in a long blue box as they evaluated a collection, they would blow past it and never think twice and tally it as $75 wholesale.&nbsp;&nbsp; In many cases, the audience was stumped by the PowerPoint illustration, but once the coin was passed from hand to hand, it felt fake.&nbsp; The problem is that you cannot handle a coin when you buy it online.&nbsp; All you buy is a picture.</p><p><br /></p><p>When I showed the fake ancients, none of the regular audience even dared to hazard a guess.&nbsp; They knew the coins were fake because that was the subject, but no one knew enough off the top of their heads to say why.</p><p><br /></p><p>Among my slides was an outtake from a Celator article about modern fake ancients being salted into lots of &quot;uncleaned&quot; Romans.</p><p><br /></p><p>I closed my talk by using bolt cutters to destroy all of the examples.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is one of my other avatars:[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in