I recently bought at auction this South Korean 1990 Five-hundred Won coin. It has fifteen gouges drilled out of the obverse. I'm pretty sure this was one of those coins that criminals in Japan would use to put in Japanese vending machines as a "fake(?)" 500 'Yen' coin in order to get back a REAL 500 Yen coin (which is worth 10 times the value of a S. Korean 500 Won coin) by pressing the "reset" (coin return) button on the machine. This happened around the late 1990s and in August of 2000, the Japanese Mint changed the design of their 500 Yen coin because of this activity. What is such a coin called in numismatic terms? I don't think that it's simply a "counterfeit coin", but a REAL coin, altered in order to substitute for another nation's coin, and utilized to make an (illegal) profit in a vending machine. What are such coins called? What would a grading company call it? Any help would be appreciated.
The term you're looking for is. . .. Wait for it . . .. Wait for it. . . . . Slug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(coin)
Right. It says at that wikipedia page: "a slug can be a genuine coin used in another country". In the absence of any other explanation, I guess it's really called a "Slug." Dang....I was HOPING that there might have been a more technical-sounding term that I could use to dazzle people with when talking about this coin. Now I'm left saying, "Oh yeah, and here's that same coin, but used as a SLUG." Big yawn.
You could always try to find the word in Latin and use that..."this coin displays a high level of crateris..." I'm just trying to be funny - I don't speak, read, or write Latin.
