With the seemingly endless stream of, "Is this fake?" posts I thought an educational (or at least commiseratory) thread on fakes I've purchased and how I, a relative novice homo, figured they were fakes was in order. It's a true "post of shame" for me. Hopefully you all will pile on with your frustrating fakes and clues newbs can use to look out for this garbage. 1st is a beautifully obvious fake. You can practically smell the new coin smell on it. Look at that. Some thoughtful person stamped VRL on the back to make folks aware this is a modern repro (reproduction). You can also see a very pronounced casting seem along the sides. And still it didn't stop someone from not posting the reverse and selling it as authentic on ebay! (Don't worry mom. I trimmed my nails right after taking this pic) Next up is a dream coin. No, not Sulla's dream. But close. This fake of the notorious dictator looks to good too be true...cause it is! They even took the time to put those cracks on the side (kind of like a recent "is it fake" Julius Caesar that was posted). The "tell" for me was all those pimply looking casting bubbles. Another real heartbreaker was this Pupienus. What an interesting patina on this Denarii. A type of patination that I'd never seen. That just happens to neatly cover up all of those craters and the overall mushiness of the modern forgery. Here's one that should have been pretty obvious. But I was eager and ignorant. The style simply doesn't match any of Pertinax coinage. Lastly, an early Greek purchase of mine. I've always enjoyed Gorgons on coin. This one was cheap and seemed like there were lots of them. Sadly, there are lots of them that are fakes! There are many great resources for spotting fakes. I really like the Forum's Dr Ilya's fake coin report. Its helped me spot more then a couple. http://www.forumancientcoins.com/fakes/ So, hopefully some of you learned something, feel a bit better about some of your mistakes (or at least got a chuckle at how many times this man has proven PT Barnum right). Please pile on those modern fakes, mistakes and lessons learned.
So apparently this is not a modern fake, but an ancient counterfeit. I picked it up at the Baltimore Whitman show last month. I grabbed it because of the relatively clear obverse and reverse that I thought I would be able to easily identify. By the end of the day I spent with it I was nearly pulling out what little hair I have left. Thanks to the helpful people here, I was reassured that I: a) was using my resources to correctly identify the coins b) the coin in question was a counterfeit using a Maximus Thrax obverse paired with a Severus Alexander reverse. So this doesn't quite fit the fakes or mistakes in the original post but I definitely learned quite a lot from it.
Very early in my coin collecting "career" when eBay was a new thing and the Celator was still in print, I bought this one from an eBay dealer as a "Caligula and Caesonia": After all, it looked very similar to one posted at an academic website, the Virtual Catalog of Roman Coins, maintained by Austin College: The coin had a "soft" appearance and feel to it and there were traces of a casting seam around the edge -- though I believe most of the flan was filed down -- and the whole coin had an artificial patina applied to age the coin and cover the file work on the edge. I compared the coin to that one posted on the Virtual Catalog of Roman Coins' page and it was identical in flan shape and die and placement of the dies on the flan -- it was a cast copy -- the only differences being the artificial patinas that were applied to each. Both coins are forged. I confronted the dealer with this evidence and demanded (and got) a refund without returning the coin only to be sold to another sucker. I eventually bought another example -- a genuine one -- and also learned that the coin does not actually portray Caesonia at all, but a personification of Salus. Here's the real deal: Caligula AD 37-41. Roman provincial Æ 28 mm, 11.17 gm. Carthago Nova, Spain, AD 37-38. Obv: C. CAESAR AVG. GERMANIC. IMP. P.M. TR.P. COS., laureate head of Caligula, right. Rev: CN. ATEL. FLAC. CN. POM. FLAC. II. VIR. Q.V.I.N.C., head of Salus right, SAL AVG across field. Refs: SGI 419; Heiss 272, 35; Cohen 247, 1; RPC 1, 185; SNG Cop 503.
This fake Parthian fooled me early in my numismatic career, and I've kept it ever since as a reminder to check every coin carefully: There's an overall mushiness to the details, and also notice how the reverse legend cuts off at about 7 o'clock (where the original coin had an edge). But what really puts the nail in the coffin is the mismatch between obverse and reverse: the obverse is of Mithradates II (c.123-88 BC), while the reverse is from a century later (Sellwood type 63)!
I picked up a couple of fake coins this year, I've posted them several times so I'll give them a rest. Both were ebay coins with poor pictures, so I was well aware of the risk they could be fake. Here is the first coin I posted here almost 6 years ago! This was in a lot of 20 or so uncleaned coins, the rest were LRB slugs. This one was prominently displayed on top of the pile, the bait worked....I got the lot! Well, I didn't end up paying any more for that lot than any other one really, and like most poor uncleaned lot coins, almost all the coins were slugs anyway. I still have this for a conversation piece at least, maybe it was the best thing in the lot after all! LOL! Anyway, it is an fantasy piece or some type of tourist coin in the (obverse) style of Byzantine anonymous follis. I've never seen anything that resemble this reverse, so I don't know if the maker was really trying to fool anyone. It depicts a nimbate figure (Christ I think) and an emperor flanking a lop sided altar type thing.
Fake Galla Placidia bought from (and returned to) Emporium Hamburg, earlier this year. I learned several things from this purchase: 1) to recognize the pealed, blown off quality, of late roman fakes pressed on genuine ancients flans 2) Emporium Hamburg is a shady shady auction house that is to be avoided at all costs-- particularly in this area of numismatics. 3) genuine coins of Galla Placidia are very rare, but the market is so flooded with fakes that it appears that they're not.
A very useful thread. In the course of bargain-hunting, I've accumulated some fakes, some of which I have shared elsewhere. Here, for the first time, is my prettiest fake, a denarius of Julia Domna. At first glance, I thought it was genuine, a rather handsomely-toned example of a fairly common type. In hand there was something too good to be true about it - then when I weighed it, it was 4 grams, too heavy for one of these. When I checked the Forgery Network, there it was, more than once. Fake. There are things about this one that makes it dangerous to a low-grade collector like me - the way the reverse is off-center with some of the lettering missing, the semi-mushy IVLIA on the obverse, the ovalish flan - rather in keeping with genuine Severan denarii. Doug or some of the other Severan experts could probably find other things wrong with it; I'd be interested to hear their evaluation.
So far so good I think as far as fakes in my collection...I'm trying to develop a very wary eye for such things.
I got this one in a cheap lot with 9 other low grade but authentic coins. I didn’t buy the lot for this coin... and since the whole lot was $10 for 10 coins, not a big deal.
.. after looking at 1000's of coins of a type, one gets a purdy good feel for what's authentic and what's not, but even that's no guarantee on all of'em.. some can fool even the best.
I bought this knowing it was fake. There are no official silver campgates of this type (after the Argenteus coins of the 290s). It's probably modern... but there is genuine old wear and encrustations on this cast coin. So... who knows, it was cheap. A fun curio anyway. Silver cast coin of Constantius II Arles RIC VII 316
Ah, good old VRL.. when I was an archaeology student 15 years ago I spent some time at a dig in Xanten. One day, one of the students brought a replica aureus and surreptitiously pushed it into the pile of dirt his friend was sifting through during a break. Good times.
Wayne Sayles has written a good book called "Classical Deception". In it, on page 122, he quoted my thoughts on forgeries that are rather different from those of most collectors. For those who do not own the book I will copy the last two phrases: Unless a collector concedes that he will be duped in the process of his collecting and that he will buy at least some fakes, he will never be a real collector. Because collecting, like life, is not only about winning, it is about both winning and losing.
