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Coin counterfeiting of valuable antique
coin A coin is a small, flat (usually depending on the country or value), round piece of metal or plastic used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order ...
s is common; modern high-value coins are also counterfeited and circulated.Coin Counterfeiting
Counterfeit Coins (2007-26-09)
Counterfeit antique coins are generally made to a very high standard so that they can deceive experts. This is not easy and many coins still stand out.


History

Counterfeits of higher-value coins in circulation, designed for general circulation at face value, have been made by criminals for thousands of years.


Circulating coins

For modern coins in general circulation, the most common method of protection from forgeries is the use of bi-metallic coins made of two
metal A metal (from ancient Greek, Greek μέταλλον ''métallon'', "mine, quarry, metal") is a material that, when freshly prepared, polished, or fractured, shows a lustrous appearance, and conducts electrical resistivity and conductivity, e ...
s of different color, which are difficult to counterfeit at low cost. The most common way of forging these coins is to change the area that should be a different color by painting it; however, the paint is often easy to scratch off and the coins soon look very crude once worn. An increasing number of coins are cast from the same composition alloy as the real coin, but have poor reproduction of details such as the milling on the side of the coin and the stamped lettering. When the
euro The euro ( symbol: €; code: EUR) is the official currency of 19 out of the member states of the European Union (EU). This group of states is known as the eurozone or, officially, the euro area, and includes about 340 million citizens . ...
was introduced into
Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
, there were initially very few counterfeits; however, the number increased massively as time went by. The high and increasing number of fake euro coins in circulation in 2004 led to the creation of a Technical and Scientific Center for the coordination of technical actions to protect euro coins against counterfeiting.EU Crackdown
Counterfeit Coins(2007-26-09)
Between 2002 and 2006, approximately 400,000 counterfeit euro coins were removed from circulation; however, "the overall number is very small by historical standards and by comparison to the 69 billion circulating (genuine) euro coins." In 2014, it was estimated that 3.04% of all UK £1 coins in circulation are counterfeit. These coins were replaced on 15 October 2017 with new, harder to counterfeit, 12-sided bi-metallic coins.


Collectible counterfeit coins

A well known and popular numismatic item is the 1944
nickel Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive but large pieces are slow t ...
counterfeited by Francis LeRoy Henning. Unlike official specimens, this spurious item is missing a large
mintmark A mint mark is a letter, symbol or an inscription on a coin indicating the mint where the coin was produced. It should not be confused with a mintmaster mark which is the mark of the mintmaster. History Mint marks were first developed to locate ...
for the
Philadelphia Mint The Philadelphia Mint in Philadelphia was created from the need to establish a national identity and the needs of commerce in the United States. This led the Founding Fathers of the United States to make an establishment of a continental national ...
. Because of a different wartime composition, all nickels of this period had large mintmarks. Normally the Philadelphia mint would not have included one, but in 1944 all of its nickels had a "P" above the dome of
Monticello Monticello ( ) was the primary plantation of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 26. Located just outside Charlottesville, V ...
. It is estimated that 100,000 of these coins were placed into circulation. Today they remain readily available to collectors. Both scarce 1923-D and 1930-D dimes were found in circulation, and they are of interest to collectors since no such date-mint combinations were issued for this particular denomination. It has been suggested that they may have been part of an attempt by the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
to sell its silver on the world market by counterfeiting (with full precious metal weight) U.S. coins. If so, the engravers blundered by producing "impossible" coins. Among the examples of counterfeits of high-value collectible coins are the "Omega" coins produced in the early 1970s by an unknown counterfeiter who signed his creations with a miniature
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
letter
omega Omega (; capital: Ω, lowercase: ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and final letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numeric system/ isopsephy ( gematria), it has a value of 800. The ...
. He is believed to have made over 20,000 fake 1907 high-relief nominally US$20 gold
Double Eagle A double eagle is a gold coin of the United States with a denomination of $20. (Its gold content of 0.9675 troy oz (30.0926 grams) was worth $20 at the 1849 official price of $20.67/oz.) The coins are 34 mm x 2 mm and are made from ...
coins with the signature omega in the claw of the eagle, worth hundreds of millions of dollars at today's prices. His counterfeits are of such high quality that collectors will pay upwards of $1,000 for one; although a genuine coin sells for about $50,000 to $100,000. The same counterfeiter also counterfeited other US gold coins, including a large quantity of $3 gold pieces, dated 1874, 1878 and 1882, with the 1882 being the most prevalent. Three of the counterfeit $10 gold pieces, the 1910-P, the 1913-P and the 1926-P, have the omega placed upside down within the upper loop of the "R" of "LIBERTY" in the Native American's headdress.


See also

* Counterfeit coin problem *
Counterfeit money Counterfeit money is currency produced without the legal sanction of a state or government, usually in a deliberate attempt to imitate that currency and so as to deceive its recipient. Producing or using counterfeit money is a form of fraud or fo ...
* Trevor Ashmore


References

* Forgotten Coins of the North American Colonies, Amazon Books, John Lorenzo (2017). * Identify counterfeit coins with image
Counterfeit Silver Dollar Image Comparisons
* C. R. Gagg and P. R. Lewis, ''Counterfeit coin of the realm – review and case study analysis'', Second International Conference on Engineering Failure Analysis (ICEFA-11), Toronto, Canada, Sept. 2006, Engineering Failure Analysis, Vol 14, No 6, 1144 – 1152, 2007. * ''Forensic Materials Engineering: Case studies'', Lewis, PR, Gagg, C and Reynolds, K, CRC Press (2004). {{DEFAULTSORT:Coin Counterfeiting Money forgery