PCGS Announces Security Chip-Embedded Slabs To Protect Against Counterfeiting

Many IT departments are good, many (the majority) are not and security breeches are common what with many companies using outsourcing of IT, H1B visa holders (often Chinese) having access to sensitive info and cutting costs meaning the systems are not debugged or checked for weaknesses. Just 6 hours ago I tried to access my Australian government personal file and found oops it was down as they were trying to fix a problem. so if governments have IT issues (even with billions of dollars to spend to get things right) then what issues would a small non IT company (Collectors Universe) have in protecting against hackers who oftentimes have the backing of their government (China for instance) and access to the best hacking tools. And no matter how good the IT guys are they are using hardware and technology that is usually either made in China or has components such as chips from China (look at the security risk Huawei is and it along with all Chinese companies are bound by Chinese law to work for their government including spying and commercial espionage).
TrueViews are not that hard to match for many coins and I doubt you could spot the minute differences between many coins such as the bunch of graded coins (all BUnc so no toning differences) I have from the same die pair yet the difference in value between the MS67 and MS68 is a $20 coin verses a $400 coin. Heck if I wanted to I could crack out the $400 coin along with its chip and label and put a $20 coin with the genuine chip and label in a fake slab. So in that example it wouldn't even matter how good the chip or IT departments are.

Agreed. I am terribly sick of the negativity that always seems to come out in full force whenever PCGS does something new. This is a logical step in the right direction for the future. All these "what if" scenarios...... do you guys really think someone is going to go through all the nearly impossible trouble it would take to perfectly fake just one slabbed coin? I mean, really?

Are they going to fake a 1971-S proof Ike or an AU/MS draped bust silver dollar? Of the two, which would make the most sense in terms of potential profit? Of the two, which is likely to be in a prominent collection with a extensive history behind it? You see, the fakers are limited to only certain coins for this to be profitable anyway. They are not going to waste their time on coins. They just want numbers (cc, pins, ss, etc).

The sky is not falling. I promise.



You can't be serious. C'mon, man. Wrong. Just wrong.

Aptly put.

You guys say they are far fetched hypotheticals, not worth doing by state run entities and only worth doing on million dollar coins etc.
Yet I have a black box of PCGS encapsulated (genuine capsules, fake coins were graded) fakes, as well as PCGS slabs (genuine slabs) that were carefully opened and resealed without any telltale marks and fake slabs (would fool most dealers) containing genuine coins.
All of my fakes in genuine slabs were likely struck in China, ditto my fake slabs, ditto my collection of raw fakes. So Chinese state entities are permitting (or enabling) these fake coins to be made. Yes, they will only make a few hundred on each fake but if you have ever been to China (I have) you will see to what lengths they go to fake EVERYTHING to even make a few cents on each item.
My recent Shanghai trip happened a day before an international trade exhibition so the markets where I purchased my (fake) Italian shoes and passed up on (fake) Peace dollars and (fake) Gucci was to be closed by the government for a couple of days during the exhibition as they didn't want the delegates to see how rampant and blatant was the counterfeiting. So the government knew nearly everything there was fake but couldn't care less about stopping it.
I could have also purchased fake viagra, fake Johnny Walker and genuine carfentanil. Have to also wonder about the unused current US postage stamps that could be had for half face value or the current English 2 pound coins at half the exchange rate.

Chips like this might help you verify a slab in-person, but they won't help if you're buying on ebay or some other Internet platform. By the time you've got the coin in hand and can test that it's fake, the counterfeit-sellers have already taken your money and run.

That's not how ebay and PayPal work. The biggest problems when people do have a problem with that is that they likely either went off the rails (threatening messages are a big one here) or don't want to follow the proper procedures.




As always with this long standing claim of just trust me




False again.

You've now gone from just trust me I have fakes I can't post, to TrueViews are easy to match, to state sponsored hacking of PCGS, to opening and resealing slabs is easy, to a Spruce Crafts article that someone there could have perfected fake slabs.



Next were gonna hear about PCGS chemtrails

basebal21, did you even bother even looking at those slab numbers? If you did then didn't you wonder why those numbers went down a memory hole or why PCGS would do that? So you want to keep believing PCGSs claims of just trust us, we are the professionals who never slab counterfeits.
So now you also claim to be an expert in plastics and sonic welding? Because you must be to make an emphatic claim that it is impossible to cut and reseal slabs (saying something is false is VERY emphatic, I'm sure you have seen every device that can cut plastic to rule them out and likewise you just KNOW it is impossible to reseal a slab).
And to state Trueviews are not easy to match Seriously, have you never had a few dozen coins of the same date and mint (and often from the same die pairs) that you cannot tell apart? perhaps your collection is mediocre so you don't have that many coins to compare but I have seen collections with multiple thousands of the same date with sometimes 500+ with the same die pairs.
As for state sponsored hacking, I'm sure you are aware of the latest example of Chinese state sponsored hacking? No? Then check out what their Ministry of State Security just did, they accessed the networks of IBM and Hewlett Packard (maybe you have heard of those little companies?) and those hacks gave them access to their clients computers (gee, I hope that HID Global or Collectors Universe or any of the companies involved in this chip are reliant on those 2 corporations). Even if this particular hack didn't get PCGS then I'm sure the Cloudhopper campaign will never get them (you do know what Cloudhopper is? Cloudhopper is the codename for one of the Chinese CCPs worldwide attempts to get access to data on the Cloud, so I hope nothing to do with this NFC is stored on any cloud server network). Bit like NSA but far more malicious in every way.
Did you read the Sprucecraft article? You are completely unconcerned that the manufacturer of the fake slab knows what the minor flaws were and has had 3 years to try and perfect the slab? I'm sure you sleep soundly at night just KNOWING that nobody could ever make a good fake and that PCGS doesn't even need to add another layer of security (the chip) to combat fake slabs? Having worked some years ago in a few plastics factories (VISY, Plasdene) I know that the moulds were not that hard to make and I'm sure the technology to copy moulds has only improved.
As for chemtrails, there are far worse things that are real than that dubious thing.

basebal21, time for you to admit you got it wrong. There HAVE been documented cases of PCGS slabs successfully being opened and an inferior coin substituted and the slab resealed. Bill Sanders over on the Ike Group Forum (July 16 2010) documented a group of 5 coins that had been substituted, on one slab there was a suspicious crack and evidence of tampering (so that infers the other 4 had no tell tale signs). Basically they only got concerned as they were experienced collectors and the coins in their experience didn't match the grade. So if it wasn't a group of 5 being offered cheaply but a single coin would they have become suspicious?
Your only reply to each of the points I raised was "false again".
Do we take your claim of "false again" (with no substance to support it) or do we take the claim of Bill Sanders (and others) that there have been successful attempts at opening/resealing slabs?
And I did mention PCGS putting things down the memory hole and if you read the Ike forum thread he mentions that there was a PCGS forums thread covering the successful tampering of PCGS slabs and PCGS removed that thread.
And if you think the report from Bill Sanders isn't proof enough then how about PCGS itself? I just checked out http://www.PCGSasia.com and under their lifetime guarantee you will find that they won't apply that to such substitutions, to quote their website "...PCGS holders, replacing them with less valuable coins and resealing..." Now if it isn't possible to do such substitution on their slabs (including their latest slabs) then PCGS wouldn't even whisper such a risk would they?
As for how difficult it is to find coins that can match images it only took me 30 seconds to find doppelgangers in my collection (80098400 and 80098364). Nothing to stop a crook taking a roll with most/all the coins from the same die pair (as my doppelgangers were) and submitting the best, score some high grades, carefully substitute lesser coins from the roll and resubmit the best coins, rinse and repeat for a nice profit.