NGC -
A phony mintmark makes this gold coin appear to be worth millions.The 1927-D Saint-Gaudens double eagle (gold $20) is considered the rarest regular-issue United States coin of the 20th century. Although it has a mintage of 180,000 pieces, most examples were lost to the massive meltings of the 1930s. Nearly all known survivors are Mint State (MS), with the majority graded in the MS-65 to -66 range.
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It's likely that most were obtained directly from the Denver Mint and never circulated, so only those few specimens survive today. An MS-66 example is listed in the Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) Price Guide at over $2 million. NGC recently received a purported example of this extremely rare issue for grading.
1927-D Saint-Gaudens $20 with an added mintmarkOf course, due to the extreme rarity of this double eagle, each one submitted to NGC is examined extremely closely, especially when it does not seem to match any other known pieces. Any time that a small difference makes a coin worth almost 1,000 times more than a more-common issue, those small details must be thoroughly examined for authenticity.
In this case, the obvious concern is whether a mintmark has been added. That is exactly what happened here, as a tiny "D" (denoting the Denver Mint) has merely been glued on.
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Posted 04/29/2021 02:30 am
