Sacagawea Dollars Not From US Mint

Not odd at all. About the time the Sac came out Ecuador (or El Salvador I don't remember which) adopted the US dollar and imported a lot of the Sac dollars. (Paper notes don't hold up well in the tropical weather) Now a dollar isn't much to us but it was a significant sum down there so it was definitely worth their while to counterfeit them. Sometimes they wander up here to the US.

I was looking for one as my own "black cabinet" curiosity. I would like one the circulated as a contemporary counterfeit.

Steve, you said you found one in a bank tray, what do you think my chances are of finding one through coin roll hunting?

Just something else to look out for.

As Steve says, the tellers are not trained to detect fake $1 coins...and most people aren't either, as you might expect.
The Dollar bill is living on borrowed time, as I'm sure most folks here realize. The U.K did away with one Pound Notes years ago, switching to coins. Pound coins are heavily faked there, not uncommonly found in circulation.
Seems like a ridiculous idea, till you realize they were being counterfeited by the 55 gallon drum load . It's not a big profit idea per unit, but once you do it *literally* a million times or so, it adds up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...-1-coin.html

30 million pounds is about 60 million dollars, more or less...even a profit margin of 25% yields them 15 million dollars...

Cheaper to import ours than mint their own, especially if we are buying stuff from them (Ecuador has a lot of oil).

These countries do mint their own coins. Panama has been minting American-alike "balboas" for more than a century, at America's request (imperalism ain't easy). Ecuador has been making centavos to the same specifications of American coins since 2000 - but the Ike-sized "sucre" is really uncommon, so I assume they use Sacagaweas instead. And these countries have (proportionally) a lot more Native American heritage than the USA does, so they find the designs appealing too.

Actually, I think the Balboa is made in the US mint branches, or at least was in the not so distant past. Just like San Francisco made most of the Peso and Centavo coins for the Philippines from 1906-45, it just made more economical sense to use the multi-million dollar machinery to handle the brunt of the minting.

As for the cointerfeits, I can totally see the viability there. A $1 Sac coin has about 12 cents' worth of raw material. There would be a huge cost associated with getting your equipment set up, but as others have said, when you counterfeit millions of coins at $.25-.50 profit per coin, it wouldn't be hard to turn a tidy profit.

My question is, if they were able to make the coins of solid manganese brass, would they be able to circulate here in the US? Coin counters probably use surface conductivity as the basis for rejection of small US dollars (that's why manganese brass was used in the first place), so I imagine a solid coin would be only marginally outside of Mint tolerances for weight?