Papal States 5 Lire Or Not ? (Id: Papal States Scudi Fake Mule)

does it react to a magnet ?

The sash looks wrong. Compare to this one from MA-Shops.

Its a good coin to own - Vatican City Euros are bloody difficult to get today and they're still being made. Even if its fake, its a nice coin.

Thanks for all the replies.

It's not magnetic.

I haven't tested the specific gravity but it has the appearance of silver.

Thanks for the links, however I'm a bit fearful about using NGC as a trusted source. I've found mistakes in other series, and there's this one http://www.ngccoin.com/poplookup/Wo...oinid=345287 with a bust in an ordinary suit with a moustache and no papal cap which seems distinctly odd.

I was somewhat amused and chagrined at the same time when I saw the same coin in my collection. A fake! I agree with other comments, why make a well struck fake and then screw it up with a rookie mistake like the wrong regnal year for the pope? Frustrating but fascinating at the same time. But after viewing the real deal in multiple images, the fake isn't really all that well done. I think they made the pope look kinda fat.

Hello and welcome, hallamark!


As I understand it, the modus operandi of a Chinese fake coin factory works something like this.

The fake-makers would, almost certainly, have originally made correctly matched obverse and reverse dies for an 1870 5 lire. They presumably also would have made correctly matched dies for an 1853 scudo. Their top-tier fakes of the 1870 5 lire and the 1853 scudo would have been made using freshly-cut, correctly matched dies, probably using the correct weight and actual silver.

Once that first batch of fakes were made, the dies would have then gone into the fake-factory's inventory, awaiting production of lower-quality fakes. Those lower-quality fakes would, by definition, have less quality control - their target market is not the top-end auction houses, but the street vendors selling "rare coins" to passers-by. For these fakes, ensuing that the correct obverse and reverse dies match up perfectly is not necessary, as their target market is not actual coin collectors. So "mules" of all kinds are likely to crop up. Some of the "bottom-tier" fakes, made with poor-quality dies or when the better dies are too badly worn and re-tooled to fool anyone, are even from different countries - like this rather comical example of a St Helena 50 pence reverse muled up with a Uganda 5 shillings obverse.

Some of the "errors" may even be deliberate, in the hopes that someone with just a little knowledge about coins might think "hey, that's some kind of error" - and thus be encouraged to purchase one. I'm told by one visitor to a street market in Malaysia that, on pointing out that their "coins" had obvious errors on them (something like the mis-spelling of "PENCE" or the "1086" date on the coins in the thread I linked to earlier), the seller said "Those must be valuable mint errors then" and promptly doubled their asking price.

I'd be interested in seeing it.