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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Plumbata, post: 3268878, member: 96864&quot;]Thank you both! [USER=56859]@TIF[/USER] The dotted border on the obverse is indeed faint, but it&#039;s basically all there. Thank you for the animated .gif and corrected images, I&#039;ll try to take some better natural light photos. The cracks are believable and largely clogged with crud, and under 60x magnification one can see the &quot;layers&quot; of patina near either side of the cracks which, assuming authenticity, would have been removed from the surfaces when cleaned. I have a hard time imagining how such a visual effect would have been faked, but forgers can be exceptionally clever. It looks like something 3 dimensional that has had a few layers of old paint removed, but the recessed areas where the paint remains displays the cross-section, if that analogy makes any sense. I&#039;m sure I could scrape out the crud and clean-out the cracks but don&#039;t want to mess with it at this point.</p><p><br /></p><p>A more hopeful observation is the minor patina-smoothing in the fields, but lack of final-stage cleaning/smoothing in-between the dotted border on the reverse and mushroomed edge, or in the smaller areas like in-between Hephaestus&#039; right arm and torso, where the surfaces seem a bit dirtier and rougher, but that isn&#039;t particularly useful diagnostically.</p><p><br /></p><p>As [USER=96900]@Lolli[/USER] shared they are from an eBay seller who is not a professional dealer. They are slowly selling off their collection, prior coins obtained from them seem fine and I get no &quot;bad vibes&quot; from them personally, but I was consciously aware that they themselves may have inadvertently bought fakes for their collection which are now being sold. Some of their Corinthian staters looked a bit sketchy to me. I also thought that it would have been crafted with transfer dies if it is a fake, but was unable to find any reported examples or discussion on someone&#039;s excellent blog detailing other Lipara fakes. There always has to be a &quot;first&quot; though, and certainly not all fakes are documented. And I should have noticed that the 2 coins were the same, I was too busy looking at the details that I didn&#039;t look at the overall coin. Couldn&#039;t see the forest for the trees. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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