Dual Denomination Coins

I've groused about these fabrications for years. TPGs should use a special label if they stoop to slabbing them for they are most certainly not "errors".

I like real dual-denominated coins, like the New Zealand ten cents / one shilling of 1966. Not this.

I'm going to invoke my good old friend Ockham and his Razor: the most probable explanation is the one with the fewest assumptions, or in this case, the one with the shortest chain of improbable events.

Modern mints are still, essentially, gravity-powered or at least gravity-assisted: blanks go in at the top, finished coins fall out the bottom. So for this to have occurred "naturally" as a genuine "error", a finished quarter has to somehow levitate all the way back up, fly over to a different coin press nearby and land itself into the hopper of penny blanks. Since coins do not naturally float upwards and only extremely rarely find themselves flying upwards for long distances when impacted by high-speed machinery, it seems unlikely that this could happen without human "help".

The second "improbable event" is implied by your final statement I quoted above: for this to have occurred "naturally" as a mint error, there would have had to have been a serendipitous failure of the collar die at the exact moment that a quarter happened to be fed into the press. So, this means two highly improbable events happening sequentially. Let's also throw in the "improbable event" of the date of the original quarter being miraculously not-obliterated. Yeah, nah bro.

Far more likely is the single, still improbable event, of someone "fooling around with the coin presses" and getting away with it. An alternative also-improbable explanation is that someone actually stole a couple of Lincoln Cent dies and made this coin in their basement using their own press (which would also handily explain the "missing collar"). A third possibility which should not be lightly dismissed is the " Lincoln Cent die" used here is actually counterfeit. Yes, PCGS may have slabbed it as genuine, but they could be mistaken. But I would regard all three of those explanations as more probable then "an actual error caused by some chain of malfunctions within the mint".


I've split out this part of the OP because it's a separate issue. I've had some debate over on the CU forums regarding the legality of fabricated mint errors, in the context of that 1970 proof quarter that was struck over an 1898 gold $2.50, but the principle remains true for this object too.

My take is this: Suppose "you" are the person responsible for creating this artifact. If "you" legally owned that original New Hampshire quarter that's used to create the error, then technically, it's still "yours" - all you've done is damage it in a certain specific way, and damaging coins isn't illegal. In the US, coins issued for circulation are not ipso facto the property of the government. The government's "ownership" of certain kinds of never-issued coins (like 1933 double eagles and 1964 silver dollars) rests on the basis that the government paid for the labour, resources and raw materials used to make those coins, and never officially relinquished that ownership by releasing them to the public through circulation so they therefore remain government property. So the Mint wouldn't "own" that quarter and there would be no legal basis for the government "stealing" it off you. Even if it were proved that the quarter was overstruck by genuine Lincoln Cent dies at an actual US Mint facility, the act of striking a piece of metal with coin dies does not magically and automatically impart government ownership of that piece of metal.

They might be able to charge you with "misuse of government property" but couldn't charge you with "stealing government property". And if you made the quarter then sold the quarter for big bucks, they might be able to seize that money as "proceeds of crime", but couldn't actually seize the quarter, since it's not theirs; future owners of the quarter should be able to buy, sell and own it in peace, without threat of seizure.