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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Bill in Burl, post: 2903472, member: 23692&quot;]About the article on Congress starting to initiate action on counterfeits ..... That subcommittee was in touch with, and got direction from, Mike Marshal from up here in Canada to find out how he was able to stop Chinese counterfeits from being bought and sold.&nbsp; Mike took it upon himself to try to do something since the Royal Canadian Mint and government would do nothing.&nbsp; Mike and&nbsp; the single Canadian Mountie responsible for overseeing the Canadian govt counterfeiting enforcement were able to get an &quot;in&quot; at Ebay thru Paypal.&nbsp; They put the screws to Paypal because that was where the money transfer was really taking place with the open exchange of selling.&nbsp; Starting with Paypal&#039;s recommendations, Ebay would remove any auction available in Canada that was reported to be fake/counterfeit and they did.&nbsp; To thank Mike for giving them the &quot;hows and whys&quot; of how they accomplished what he did, Congress sent him a nice check and huge thank-yous.&nbsp; Unfortunately, up here, the Mountie that was involved was transferred to the West Coast from Ottawa and the RCMP dedicated interest in the program died with his transfer.&nbsp; Mike (and now with a few other&#039;s help&quot; still contact Ebay on a daily basis to remove counterfeit coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>Not just the US Mint stuff, but now Canadian silver and gold Maple Leafs are being copied and they are getting quite good .. no more crude portraits or porous castings like 5-10 years ago.&nbsp; Now with lasers and Cad-Cam actually making dies using actual coins to be traced/copied, things get very tricky trying to see the good from the bad.&nbsp; Since they use an actual coin for the computer to read and then fed to the laser cutter making the dies, all the fakes will have the same anomalies that the real coin had .. so any die cracks, nicks, dings, etc will be copied so that all the fakes will show any signs of post-mint damage that was on the real one.&nbsp; The computers also don&#039;t pick up the hairlines of the portraits fully, age cracks or corner eye -wrinkles are sometimes weak and the transition with the bridge of the nose is sometime not quite right.&nbsp; Since they (the counterfeiters) are not numismatists, they also sometimes have an Obverse-Reverse marriage that never was made.&nbsp; The fakes coming out in the last 2 years are getting REALLY good and it takes good eyes and a good scale to sometimes find them.</p><p><br /></p><p>If any of my comments in this posting were covered in an earlier part of this thread, I apolgize, but I didn&#039;t feel like reading 5 pages of content.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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