Bogus 1824 Bust Half

contemporary fake. anyone know what this is made out of? Can we get a weight on it? how off is the weight?

most of the contemporary counterfeit coins are made of the correct composition and even the correct weight, sometimes they were even a little heavier than the originals. With that being said this one is probably coin silver just like the originals were. Contemporary counterfeits were made to circulate along side of their original counterparts. Its the modern counterfeits that are usually made of junk metal and are the ones that sometimes stick to magnets and the weight is usually to far off to be real where the older ones are usually close because they didn't want it to attract attention when being carried and used

The contemporary Bogus Busties tend to be made of German Silver, a copper nickel zinc alloy. Some are copper with a silver plating. They are usually significantly underweight. Making a contemporary counterfeit out of silver would have been a waste of time since the coin had nearly its full face value of silver in the coin. A counterfeiter making full value fakes makes no profit. He could make some profit by short weighting the coins, but he can make a lot more by using the German Silver, which looks a LOT like silver when it is new.

The turn of the 20th century fake Morgan dollars were able to use full weight of silver because at that time the silver in a dollar was only worth about 30 cents. The middle easter fake gold coins of the 50's and 60's were able to be full weight because US gold coins were selling for roughly two to three times bullion value.