Coin Talk

There are many good counterfeit gold coins out there. This one is listed in United States Gold Counterfeit Detection Guide by Bill Fivaz, as example 1 of the 1853 dollars. It is real gold but the color is "off" a little. You might not be able to see all the diagnostics with these pictures but [...]

Is this 1916 D Mercury Dime real, or a counterfeit? This is not for any prize, just to see what people think. Actual authenticity will be revealed on August 3, 2010. You can post your answers here on this page. View full post on CoinTalk - Coin Chat Related Blogs August 2010 Issue of First [...]

There are now so many fake £1 coins in circulation the Royal Mint could be forced to scrap all of the coins and reissue the entire denomination. Their warning came as new figures indicated there were £41 million fake £1 coins in Britain – one in every 36 in circulation. This is a record level [...]

Yesterday after work my wife gave me a nickel she had found at work in the coffee fund money. Make a long story short the nickel is a 1990-D counterfeit!Here’s just a small bit of info as you can see it in the pics. The nickel weighs the right amount 5 grams, but I took [...]

I was talking to a friend of mine whos also into coins and somehow this subject came up and it got me thinking for a topic here. If your a type collector on a limited income for your collecting, would you purchase a real good Chinese counterfeit of very rare coins I.E. a chain cent, [...]

This week at ANA Summer Seminar I took the ‘Detection of Counterfeit and Altered US Coins’ course. (This is the second time I have taken this course.) The first day of the course a 16-year-old boy in the class showed a Seated Liberty dime to another student and asked him if it looked OK. He [...]

This proof 1878 Shield Nickel looks pretty at first glance, but a more careful evaluation reveals that it’s a fake. The old saying, “When a thief kisses you, count your teeth,” can be applied to the world of business in many useful ways. And when it comes to counterfeit detection, it is also surprisingly apt, [...]

Was browsing the bay, and came across this: Seller has no feedback, appears to be in China, yet the coin seems to be a pretty good counterfeit if it actually is. What diagnostics can you see on the coin that would signal counterfeit? Everything about the listing points in that direction except the images of [...]

Urban legends have a nasty habit of spreading once their seed has been planted. It appears some carelessly made remarks from a local Toronto merchant that were followed by a report on a television station investigating those remarks may have initiated the latest concerns blossoming into a numismatic urban legend that Canada’s “toonie” coin is [...]

Many U.S. numismatic items have been counterfeited or otherwise imitated over the years, some so often that authenticators such as myself are automatically suspicious of them. Near the head of this list are the Indian Peace Medals issued by the United States government from the 1790s up to 1890, of which perhaps 90% of the [...]