Yes, I found another one today in a penny roll. I’m 99.9% sure this cent has been manipulated on purpose. Sorry to post so many of these, but I don’t want a real mint error to get by me, thanks for everyone’s patience and help. Is coin manipulation prevalent in your areas?
No, but in my area it is not uncommon to find discarded cents in parking lots of convenience stores. The type of things that would get damaged before being picked up by someone scraping together their pennies to make a bank deposit. I am sure the last thing on their mind is a collector going through their deposits looking for rare coins.
I do see what I believe you are referring to. It appears to be both an attempt to make a fake and also badly damaged. Even if the odd strikes are real, the damage negates any collector value, IMO.
The problem is that there are thousands of ways that a coin can be damaged while in circulation, and searching through circulated coins will become very tiresome if you don't know how true errors occur during the minting process and what they are called. The best way to start is to buy a book on errors and study it from cover to cover.....repeatedly! Here is one such book!
It's damaged. When you see a coin looking like this, ask yourself how could that have happened at the Mint?