Counterfeit Detection: 1863 Gold Dollar Altered Date

NGC - This Civil War era coin is original, except for a single digit that was changed to try to make it look more valuable.

The 1863 Gold Dollar is one of the rarest and most expensive issues of the series, which ran from 1849 to 1889. A little more than 50 are listed in the NGC Census, with prices in About Uncirculated commanding thousands of dollars.

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Genuine 1863 Gold Dollar

In sharp contrast, the 1862 Gold Dollars have one of the highest mintages of the series: 1.36 million. The NGC Census contains more than 4,200 examples of these coins, with examples in About Uncirculated easily available for only a few hundred dollars, most of which can be attributed to the value of the gold contained in the coin.


Genuine 1862 Gold Dollar

NGC recently received a purported example of an 1863 Gold Dollar. Anytime that a small alteration to an existing coin can make it look like it's worth thousands of dollars more, it is prudent to closely examine the areas a counterfeiter might target. This includes adding or removing mintmarks as well as altering a digit in a date.


Altered Date Gold Dollar

The coin recently submitted to NGC has disturbances around the last digit of its date, indicating that it was altered, most likely from a '2'. The style and size of the digits in the date changed often on the Gold Dollars, but the 1862 and 1863 are much more similar than many other dates. Nevertheless, the digits of the purported 1863 actually look much closer to the style used on 1862 Gold Dollars. The shape of the altered '3' is also inconsistent with genuine examples, and the space between the bottom of the '1' and '8' is wider than expected.


Genuine 1862


Altered date


Genuine 1863

Building a collection of genuine Gold Dollars is a challenge, and there are many issues much more expensive than the 1863.

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