Daniel Carr Overstrikes - *is It Legal*

Heres my Carr 64-D Franklin

Those coins are beautiful! Does he only use MS coins for his planchets, or is there some process he uses to make them look that way?

This subject has been touched on many times, on many forums.
People either love or hate his coins.
To me, they are illegal, and IMO he just parses words and relies on technicalities to squeak them into the market.

If these were stamped as a copy or fantasy there would be no issue to discuss.As these have none of those such markings then they are clearly counterfeit coins.

Items like these give the dishonest collector the opportunity to defraud another buyer when being "on sold" .

There are more than enough dodgy coins being sold out there without condoning someone that mass produces these.

I have read untold posts about dodgy dishonest ebay listings where the sellers have been vilified.
What makes this bloke any different to those sellers

Selling these and asking that they not be on sold as genuine is about the same as selling an AK47 to a jerk and asking that he not shoot anyone

The simple act of marking these "Coins" as copy,Fantasy or Non Genuine would be the honest thing to do.
Everyone else that makes these is required to do so.

True, but he cannot control the secondary market.

If a buyer cannot be bothered to take a minute to research what they are spending money on, then maybe they shouldn't be buying coins in the first place. I do not expect someone to be have knowledge of the four distinct S-mintmark locations of the 1909-S VDB Lincoln Cent but 10 seconds on Wikipedia will tell you that 1964 Franklin half dollars and 1975 Ikes simply do not exist.

Lets face it here- the Hobby Protection Act is an almost 40 year old piece of legislation. It was written with vagaries that were not foreseen in the 1970s and is in desperate need of a rewrite. Even though the hobby has been flooded with cheap and deceptive counterfeits of coins from abroad for the last decade, Congress and the Federal Government has shown ZERO interest in solving the problem. I have to think that Daniel Carr has a deliberate point to his actions- doing something so out in the open that the situation can only be addressed with a rewriting and modernization of the HPA. If such a rewriting deems Carr's restrikes to be illegal, then so be it. He knows that it would not hurt his minting business since he will just go back to creating original designs like he did previously.

Until someone from the Government tells him that his restrikes are illegal and backs it up with valid legal opinion, he will continue to crank them out. The fact that he has been able to mint them in an unimpeded fashion means one of two things- the Federal Government is completely disinterested and couldn't care less what Carr does(a bad scenario but not surprising) or the Feds know that the HPA has grey areas and they have no legal backing to stop him since he is creating copies of coins that do not exist. Yes, the 1964 Peace dollar once existed but much like the dinosaurs, it is now officially extinct according to the US Mint regardless of one or two that may or may not be in private hands.

Says you. A ton of others say otherwise.

Except for the Smithsonian specimens the 1933 Double Eagles never made it out either, all were ordered destroyed. We all know what happened there.