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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Reid Goldsborough, post: 38393, member: 34&quot;]I agree that counterfeit coins can be very collectible. Don&#039;t pay any attention to the people who try to scare you away from this by citing laws and referring to the Secret Service. The law regarding simple possession of counterfeit U.S. coins (without intent to sell or pass as genuine) is not clear, and nobody has ever been arrested in the U.S. for possessing a counterfeit of a collectable coin. The most visible&nbsp; numismatic legal expert in the country, Armen R. Vartian, legal columnist for Coin World and author of the book A Legal Guide to Buying and Selling Art and Collectibles, has stated flat out that the statutes do not make collecting counterfeit U.S. coins a crime.</p><p><br /></p><p>According to U.S. law, the government does have the authority to confiscate counterfeits of U.S. coins (or paper money), regardless of their age, since they&#039;re all legal tender, but the Secret Service has a hands-off policy with collectable coins. It&#039;s hasn&#039;t done this in more than 30 years. It has much bigger fish to fry -- going after organized crime and terrorist elements counterfeiting current currency.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anybody interesting in collecting counterfeit coins, if you&#039;re an ANA member, should borrow the video &quot;Famous Fakes and Fakers&quot; by Ken Bressett, editor of A Guide Book of United States Coins (the Red Book) and past president of the ANA. Bressett is an avid collector of counterfeit coins, and he does a nice job sharing his enthusiasm as well as illustrating some of the more fascinating counterfeit coins through the ages.</p><p><br /></p><p>I can assure you, in contrast to Marotta&#039;s statement, that Bressett still knows the difference between what is real and what isn&#039;t. Marotta also says there&#039;s no need to study fakes. But he earlier said that he stopped collecting ancient coins because he was afraid of fakes. I believe he has since had a change of heart and is collecting again. But studying fakes can indeed protect you from getting cheated with them, which is the reason of course that publications such as Counterfeit Coin Bulletin exist (and will hopefully be published again soon) and books such as Coin Grading and Counterfeit Detection exist.</p><p><br /></p><p>But I&#039;ll have to respectively disagree with GDJMSP&#039;s assertion that it wasn&#039;t the criminal element that over the centuries has engaged in counterfeiting because they didn&#039;t have access to gold and silver. Actually, most ancient counterfeits were gold and silver plated base-metal coins, typically bronze or lead. They were indeed created by criminals, and the creation of them was at times punishable by death.</p><p><br /></p><p>I do agree with you that counterfeiting has been used an a weapon in war from the earliest of times. The U.S. government is one of many that did this, in its case counterfeiting Nazi money during World War II. This is one of many fascinating elements to counterfeit coins. Studying all this doesn&#039;t in some Twilight Zone way make you evil, just as reading crime novels doesn&#039;t turn you into a serial murderer.</p><p><br /></p><p>The most enjoyable aspect of all this to me is helping prevent others, and myself, from getting cheated. A lot of others enjoy this aspect of it too. More here:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://rg.ancients.info/bogos/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://rg.ancients.info/bogos/" rel="nofollow">http://rg.ancients.info/bogos</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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