ICCS Graded 1914 10-Cent - Your Thoughts?

I just looked through the Chinese ebay seller's "sold" items and there was both a Canadian 1912 & 1916 Edward 10 cent and a 1909 George 10 cent that all sold for pretty big money. Wow! Are there ever some uneducated buyers .. all the Canadian stuff had more than 10 bids (but bidders hidden).

At the same time.... studying Counterfeits helps us appreciate the subtleties and varieties of our real ones. All of your expert analysis has shown me so much, esp regarding obv varieties, which is a difficult subject for me and my loupe.

Might be mean to say.... but it allows me to learn without having to pay tuition (ie get burned).

Thanks.

Coinhunter: Did the guy that you bought the coins from GET his coins from an ebay vendor named elizabeth.geo?

The RCNA will come to the rescue!! These are the third generation coming from China. I will bet the dime is on a 90% silver planchet, mav be 40%. I have one some where with eddie but laughed it off. They have no proper obverse yet at HK for the dime. The penny and quarter are concerning. They will not spend a lot of money on the new dies as they are successful with the old ones. ICCS will not be held accountable.

Mike, I don't think anyone is expecting for ICCS to be held accountable. But I am curious, do they seek out (and do you share) the latest counterfeit data? The 1914 is an obvious blunder but examples such as the 1920 and especially the 1891 not so much.

I can only speak as a "less educated" collector... I've been slowly filling in silver dollars in better grades, and as those start to finish off there's no doubt I was considering moving off into other denominations. News like this actually makes me more inclined to get out of the hobby than to progress in it. The only thing I see here is that any higher end coins I consider will have to be PCGS ... I feel like if ICCS hasn't got a prayer neither do I - I would like to think I'd have caught the Edward obverse I'm as guilty at quick glancing it as others.

I stayed away from militaria for this reason, too many fakes out there. I'm glad that many of the folks here can pick these things apart, but tbh if I were producing these things I'd be monitoring sites like this and refining the design. Taking a scratch out of a 3D cad drawing is trivial, our college students can do this fairly easily, so given time ... either they're going to hope for the quick dump and profit or they'll refine it to the point that we'll have to use personal XRF to even make a purchase.

Yes a bit of over reaction here, I haven't listed my collection on the 'bay yet but the thought ran through my head more than once today.

Unfortunately, these incidents could be the nail in the coffin for coin collecting in an electronic money world.

I agree with other comments here that if these fakes are being passed as real coins through ICCS, there is no chance that I can catch these myself. The technology today is making some of these fake coins very difficult to be noticed even to a seasoned collector.

If they can make such good dies to strike the fakes that sell for hundreds of dollars then presumably they might take the effort to get the alloys right. So XRF analysis will be of little use to pick up the better fakes.
Does anyone have an estimate of the cost of 3D printing a fake die if you already have all the equipment? If the cost is sub $100 per die then nothing really to stop them from faking very small batches of each date/denomination from hundreds of different series and countries and then how will TPGs spot the fakes? They would need to be experts in every date that they examine to know the genuine die pairs from the spurious.
Takes me up to 5 minutes per coin to identify a specific die pair so how will the TPGs do that level of checking when they only allow under 20 seconds to assess everything about a coin at the moment?
What happens to the hobby when the fakes get so good that the fake die pairs match the real die pairs in every die marker?