Technology and the future of collecting

At Will perfect copies destroy values?  Pat Heller opines on the possibility that one day nanotechnology will make it possible to duplicate numismatic rarities.

Eventually it will be possible, for instance, to duplicate an 1804 Bust dollar right down to its atomic makeup.  Just about anything imaginable could be copied, such as the Series 1890 $1,000 Treasury Note nicknamed the Grand Watermelon, a 1933 $20 Saint-Gaudens double eagle, or a 1974-D aluminum Lincoln cent. The sky is the limit of what could be duplicated to such a degree that even an atomic analysis would not be able to find any difference between an original and its copy.

He ends with this:

I have been asked the question many times in my life what kinds of items do I think will have high value in the coming centuries. I’m not sure that any particular physical good would qualify if a copy is potentially easy to come by.

Of course this isn't alchemy. Whatever other expense may be involved, duplicating a double eagle still will require a double eagle's worth of gold. Nor do I think that duplication costs will be cheap - not at first and not that it would matter in the case of great rarities, of course.  And there will be laws against such activities, though again that won't matter to forgers.

Certification will become much more important and deep scanning and sniffing (see PCGS Secure) recorded against the certified coin means even more work for the counterfeiter because they would have to match those details, which means they must have access to the real coin. How many copies of a certified coin can they sell without arousing suspicion? I would think it would become nearly impossible to sell anything NOT certified and I also believe that buyers will immediately register all such purchases with the Set Registries, especially as that technology becomes less expensive.

As provenance would ultimately be the deciding factor, knowing who owned the real coin and when they owned it would become critical.  As new certifications of any coin would be effectively impossible, the grading services like PCGS could only depend upon their Set Registry databases to survive, which of course means that they'd have to charge for that service.  Obviously their need for graders would decrease markedly, as all they'd be handling is regrades, reholders, and possibly crossovers (although that would probably require access to information from the other grading service).

Obviously if you believe that this technology could become real before you are ready to sell, you should be certifying all your coins now and entering them in a database Set Registry.  This would also apply to those of us who want to pass our collections on when we die.

Note: All my coins are in a safe deposit box. I keep nothing in my home.

Contests and giveaways: http://coins.aplawrence.com/2014/05/contests-and-giveaways.html

Book Review: Numismatic Forgery

This is a disturbing book.  It's fun reading, but the author asserts that none of the forgery methods he details are difficult or outrageously expensive for the average person to reproduce. He disavows having personal knowledge of some techniques like explosive impact copying, yet manages to provide convincing photographic details of exactly that, making one wonder if his actual experience is more than he says!

It also makes you wonder what professional forgery teams might accomplish. We know the answer, of course, as we've all seen their output exposed in various articles.  But are the ones that are identified truly the best of the forgers art? Reading this book makes me suspect that there may well be harder to detect fakes and some may have even been certified as genuine!

This book isn't particularly helpful as a detection aid, but it will provide a thorough understanding of the processes used to create fakes.

Buy this book at Amazon and help me support this site!

Note: All my coins are in a safe deposit box. I keep nothing in my home.

Contests and giveaways: http://coins.aplawrence.com/2014/05/contests-and-giveaways.html

Alternative currency, counterfeit, fraud or numismatic item?

The coin shown below is one of D. Carr's Moonlight Mint "Alternate Currencies". 

D. Carr has been making these "Amero" coins since 2007 as concept pieces for a Mexico/Canada/U.S. monetary union.  That union is extremely unlikely (mostly because there is no benefit to the United States), but that hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists thinking it will happen.

For an equal period of time, D.Carr has also been making "World Trade Coins", mostly announcing themselves as "Trade Dollars" or "Exchange Currency", but with some seeming to skate even closer to risking counterfeit charges.

You might well wonder why Moonlight Mint hasn't been descended upon by Federal agents.  There are at least two laws that seem to apply:

Title 18 U.S. Code § 486 - Uttering coins of gold, silver or other metal

"Whoever, except as authorized by law, makes or utters or passes, or attempts to utter or pass, any coins of gold or silver or other metal, or alloys of metals, intended for use as current money, whether in the resemblance of coins of the United States or of foreign countries, or of original design, shall be fined under this title  [1] or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Title 18 U.S. Code § 514 - Fictitious obligations

(a) Whoever, with the intent to defraud—

(1) draws, prints, processes, produces, publishes, or otherwise makes, or attempts or causes the same, within the United States;

(2) passes, utters, presents, offers, brokers, issues, sells, or attempts or causes the same, or with like intent possesses, within the United States; or

(3) utilizes interstate or foreign commerce, including the use of the mails or wire, radio, or other electronic communication, to transmit, transport, ship, move, transfer, or attempts or causes the same, to, from, or through the United States,

any false or fictitious instrument, document, or other item appearing, representing, purporting, or contriving through scheme or artifice, to be an actual security or other financial instrument issued under the authority of the United States, a foreign government, a State or other political subdivision of the United States, or an organization, shall be guilty of a class B felony.

Bernard von NotHaus ran afoul of those laws with his "Liberty Dollar".  Why hasn't D. Carr experienced the same problem?

The "intent to defraud" and "intended for use as current money" might have a lot to do with it. There's another firm openly selling coins which look very much like the von NotHaus coins - they are still in business.  They have made some changes in hopes of avoiding a similar result.

Another reason the Moonlight Mint coins may escape prosecution is their very low mintage and relatively high issue price.  It's hard to imagine a jury seriously considering that a dollar sized coin with a mintage of under 100 that was sold for $30 to $80 is "intended for use as current money".

Still, it's always possible that some prosecutor will try. Satirical pieces like this FBI Raids Chuck E. Cheese For “Undermining U.S. Currency” might turn out to be not so farcical. Amusingly, such publicity for D. Carr would probably increase the value of the other pieces that Moonlight mint has produced!

Note:  All my coins are in a safe deposit box.  I keep nothing in my home.

The Henning Counterfeit Nickels

In 1954, a fellow named Francis Leroy Henning counterfeited several hundred thousand nickels dated 1939, 1944, 1946, 1947 and 1953.  That may seem like an odd coin counterfeit, but it wasn't quite as insane as it sounds because a nickel then had the same purchasing power as fifty cents or more would have today. Henning assumed that nobody would notice his fakes as they were only nickels.

He made a mistake in choosing 1944, though, because he wasn't aware that date should have a large mintmark on the reverse, even for Philadelphia minted coins (which carried no mintmark at that time). Henning's counterfeits had no mintmark.

If you find a 1944 nickel without a mintmark, it's a Henning counterfeit. Interestingly, although the FBI siezed what they could when they arrested Henning, they seem to be uninterested in these coins when they appear for sale today.

A diagnostic for Henning nickels of any date is a messed up "R" on the reverse.

However, Henning claimed to have made 6 reverse dies and 6 obverse dies. Not all have that screwy "R".   Some other clues are that a Henning may be overweight (significantly more than 5 grams), though not all are. Henning nickels are porous looking, lacking detail and may lack full rims. Some have raised dots inside the "M" of "UNUM"

Supposedly Henning branched out to other dates because when he took some of his first efforts to the bank, a teller commented that it was odd that all the dates were the same. Having the extra expense of more dies may have upset his profit margins; after conviction he is said to have claimed that he actually lost money overall.

He may have made a half million of these. When he learned that the FBI suspected him, he supposedly dumped his dies and some 200,000 coins in a river. The FBI only recovered 14,000.  Henning paid a $5,000 fine ($40,000 or so in today's money) and was sentenced to three years in prison (and apparently three more for counterfeiting five dollar bills!).

If he did make six obverse dies and they were different dates, we only know of five, so it is possible that another year could be discovered.  Any 1956 nickel you own might have been made from blanks seized at the time of his arrest, melted and reused by the Mint.

COUNTERFEITING CIRCULATING COINS

Dwight H. Stuckey The Counterfeit 1944 Jefferson Nickel
Henning Counterfeit Nickel
Henning Nickels
Definitive Tests for Henning Nickels

Note:  All my coins are in a safe deposit box.  I keep nothing in my home. 

Contests and giveaways: http://coins.aplawrence.com/2014/05/contests-and-giveaways.html

Tare Weight of PCGS Slabs/AWS-100 Digital Scale

I bought this AWS-100 scale from Amazon  last week because I thought it might sometimes be helpful for counterfeit detection.  It's light and small enough to carry in your pocket and supposedly is accurate to 100th of a gram.

I'm not too  sure about that.  Take a look at these sequential photographs of weighing a nickel on this scale.  A nickel should weigh 5.00 grams.  On each weigh, I turned the scale off, counted to 10, turned it on and counted to 10 again before putting the nickel on the scale.  You can see that the results varied quite a bit.

I've also seen 4.96 and everything in between all the way to 5.03.  If that is good enough for what you are trying to do, that's fine. For example, if you were weighing gold at $1,300 an ounce, you could be off by as much as $1.80 or so.  That's not much, though it could matter to you.  Based on my testing, you could cut that margin of error with repeated weighings, so that might help too.

This might certainly be enough to spot a raw coin of improper weight.  It won't help much if the coin is in a slab, though.   I wondered if it would be possible to determine the tare weight of a slab and thereby know the weight of the coin inside without breaking it open.

Of course, you first have to know what slab you are looking at. In examining my coins, I found at least half a dozen types and each would have its own empty weigh. In addition to that, some of the styles use plastic fingers to hold the coin - a smaller coin would use more plastic, so you'd also need to account for that.

Unfortunately, the variances in what appear to be identical slabs can be high.  These two have a .2 gram difference

36.20 g

36.00 g

The next two I tried were a different style and here the difference was only .09 g, but it's obvious that you cannot expect to accurately determine the weight of a slabbed coin this way.

35.70 g

35.61 g

Given the difficulty of even getting repeatable weights, I'd say this idea is hopeless.

Note:  All my coins are in a safe deposit box.  I keep nothing in my home. 

This week's Coinweek Giveaway: http://www.coinweek.com/~cd535e2d686a500

Also multiple contests going on at http://www.moderncoinmart.com/forum/forums/contests/

Counterfeits

I was browsing through PCGS "Shared Orders" page when I noticed an order concerning an 1850 Dubosq $10 gold piece.  That's a coin worth tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands in high grade, and it turned out to be counterfeit.  But look how long between receipt by PCGS and shipping back to the customer: almost 8 months!

Ow!  That was a long wait for a disappointing result, wasn't it? Maybe there was controversy ("That can't be fake - check it again!") or even internal argument at PCGS.  I suppose there could be other reasons for that long a delay, but one might be that determining authenticity required more than usual resources.  Perhaps other examples needed to be examined?  PCGS and the owner know, but I don't.

It did remind me that counterfeits are an ever present danger and that today, it's not just the coins: PCGS holders are also counterfeited.  For example, on that link you can see a counterfeit 1893-S Morgan in XF45.   It's in a counterfeit PCGS holder, too.

If you look up the cert number at PCGS, you'll find that it is indeed that date and condition. You can also see that it was last auctioned in 2009 for $9,200.00.  

If you clicked through the auction link, you can see a picture of the real coin.  Even a very quick look should convince you that the fake looks nothing like it, so you could have avoided a costly mistake there.

But there are not always pictures available.  Neither PCGS nor NGC takes pictures by default.  PCGS offers imaging at $10 per coin and NGC offers it at either $5 or $15 (depending on quality), but few people take advantage of that.  If the coin you are looking up hasn't been in a major auction, you may  have nothing to compare it to!

That's a shame, because even a crappy photo might well be enough to save the day.  I wish all grading/authentication included at least basic photos.  It would also be very helpful if they included a photo and precise dimensions of the plastic holder and an accurate weight of the item after encapsulation.  Those inexpensive bits of data would make passing counterfeit slabs more difficult.

We can't stop counterfeits.  However, the more difficult we can make it for the fakers, the less of a problem it would be.

Note:  All my coins are in a safe deposit box.  I keep nothing in my home. 

This week's Coinweek Giveaway: http://www.coinweek.com/~cd535e2d686a500

Also multiple contests going on at http://www.moderncoinmart.com/forum/forums/contests/