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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 3577037, member: 74282&quot;]Better make sure you know 100% that it&#039;s a fake before destroying or defacing anything. Some coins are pretty obvious but there are some imitations that use techniques making it very hard to be sure if you&#039;ve got a modern fake or an ancient one. I&#039;ve seen coins from Romania struck with transfer dies and imitations from Hungary that were cast and in both cases they were found as part of a documented hoard and are certainly ancient.</p><p><br /></p><p>As soon as you destroy or deface an authentic ancient you&#039;ve gone too far in my opinion. We had a troublesome member here who did something similar some time ago and bragged about discovering a fake by cutting into it with a Dremel and realizing it was harder than silver should be(unaware apparently that the increasing copper content of the era made a very hard alloy). I sincerely hope his experiences here have caused him to stop collecting if his first method of fake detection is destroying the coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>A better approach is to simply document their forgery status as best you can. If you don&#039;t want to be responsible for it, transfer the coin to a well known dealer or auction house with a black cabinet. As more and more coins come to market sometimes new fakes are being outed discovered but other times coins that were long thought to be altered or outright forgeries have been exonerated.</p><p><br /></p><p>All that said, it is ultimately up to the individual collector to keep fakes out of his or her collection. Few of us here are coin dealers so rather than always having to know &quot;yes this coin is authentic&quot; or &quot;no it is a forgery&quot; we always have the option of saying &quot;I don&#039;t know&quot; and sticking to coins we feel much better about. This is the best advice I can give anyone wanting to avoid fakes and the number one thing that has helped me avoid fake and altered coins. It&#039;s not so much &quot;fake until proven otherwise&quot; because I would never assert these coins I skipped were fakes(in some cases I&#039;ve proven myself wrong later down the road and in many cases my reasons were not entirely sound or logical) but for me if there&#039;s any doubt there&#039;s too much doubt and for that reason alone they&#039;re not welcome in my collection.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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