Leo VI "the Wise" missing letter???

I have a question about the Obverse lettering: +LЄOn bASILЄVS ROm This is
how the Reference Sear 1729 indicates that this coins spelling should be,
however as you can see my coin is missing the letter "n" after the LEO on
the beginning of the Obverse spelling...?
I have had several Leo VI coins and this is the first time that I have come across
this, can I get some expert opinions on what is going on here and what this may mean
for this particular coin..??

29.mm 9.1gm

 

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There is something about the way some things are wavy that usually are straight that makes me not like this coin. I do not know enough about this period to have an opinion worth stating but would ask Byzantine experts if this might be a contemporary counterfeit.

My example with N for comparison.

 

Thanks for your insight, I am an artist by trade so from my point of view I find it
unthinkable for a forger to create a counterfeit of this or any coin, and leave a
letter out??? Isn't the object of a counterfeit to be indistinguishable from an
original...?
However yes I too have seen other ancient coins with missing letters
and have deemed some of them modern day copies...

 

Here is the original auction if anyone is curious if you want to see the tag that came with it when I sold the coin.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/303985943793?ViewItem=&item=303985943793

 

Sort of. Many of the barbaric imitations/counterfeits have artists/celators who failed to understand the reversing of a die, and often have retrograde legends or letters.
Sometimes they gave up on copying lettering altogether and just did their own thing:

 

Here are the photos I took of the coin when I listed it for sale if that help:

 

Of 63 examples in the Dumbarton Oaks catalogue, only one (III.2, p. 521, 8.60) has a variant obverse legend, ending "LVSROm". The same coin has "P for b" on reverse. According to Sear, "This [type] appears to have been issued in greater quantities than almost any other individual type in the Byzantine series", suggesting that a lot of dies must have been cut. Perhaps the error was overlooked or not considered serious enough to scrap the die.