Fake Counterstamps On 1780 Maria Theresa Thaler

All credit to Baldwins I just received this reply:


"Thank you very much for the email.
We did receive your previous comments and subsequently went about undertaking some further investigations. There does seem to be some general variations in the thoughts about these countermarks and not all are considered contemporary, albeit "genuine".

However, we have now decided to withdraw these two lots (781 and 782) from the auction."

I see another issue here : such fakes being sold by a big auction house give them a pedigree ...

I have just read this thread - it is fascinating. But much said here would fall on deaf ears if presented to the "average coin dealer".

I also immediately thought of Mr. Melgar and his book on counter stamps when I saw the MTTs with the Arabic stamps.

I think the common understanding that links this thread to the one I have been involved in is the motivation that drives all too many in numismatics is profit.

When placed first profit corrupts everything.

Just today on ebay an impossible item was reported. An MS 70 grade Strike-Doubled coin.

When did Strike Doubling stop being "damage" and when did MS-70 begin including damaged coins of any kind?

Fraud will be firmly established in our Hobby as long as the average collector is willing to be duped by a label , a pedigree or blind faith in anyone or anything.

I have heard nothing

Seems the auction took place, and the fakes were still there.
At least that one was sold, and is clearly a fake ... what a pity ... http://www.sixbid.com/browse.html?a...&lot=1002739

austrokiwi High risk tolerance accompanied by wealth is one possible reason for the coins actually selling and a second reason is ignorance accompanied by too much cash. Many people buy at "description value" trusting in the dealers to know exactly what they are selling.

But I would like to suggest a third motivation one that - perhaps is in a sense of the "quest" which comes into play as well.

As a collector of counterfeits, I often bid on coins that I know are not genuine but I do not know if they are worthless recently made numismatic forgeries or valuable contemporary circulating types. Sometimes my quest is successful as in the case of a Boston Sou (Breton 690 in copper) that I won a few weeks ago for under $10. It is an original example F or so, cleaned and it has a hole. In VF it has a Catalog value of $700. I expect to get $100.

The same week I paid nearly $80 for what I thought was an early sand cast of an 1836 Zs 8R that turned out to be a recent numismatic forgery. You win some and you loose some that is the game. It is the thrill of the quest that motivates me. In 14 years on ebay I have returned fewer than 6 coins and then only for gross deception or swap outs.

There are also collectors who will never admit they were taken - even if they know. I now own an encapsulated forgery that sold for nearly $1,700 at auction to a well known numismatic author. The coin was a forgery. In that case, the coin was not returned and the buyer ate the loss to protect his professional image.

Why some fakes sell has always been a mystery to me but those are a few options that I think exist.

It is not clear to me whether any coin that got bids actually did get sold. Some coins received a minimum bid, or one step above the minimum bid. I could imagine the auction house bidding on their own account to get at least some results. I mean, we know they are crooks, so anything is possible, right?

If at least two serious collectors had believed that the coins were good, they would have sold at much, much higher prices. Take the MT-Thaler with the Philippine counterstamp (and the neatly placed fake chops) for example. If it were a good coin, it would be the first of its kind (and the only, except for the other two examples which miraculously happened to appear in just the same auction). It would be a completely unknown, uncatalogued host coin, a major find in Philippine numismatics, and it would be in a price range of several thousand dollars.

Now, it did not sell at this price. Of course, serious collectors of Philippine counterstamps, if they saw this piece, would only laugh, simply because they know the history behind it and know that an MTT would not have gotten counterstamped to begin with (something the counterfeiter did not know or care about, and obviously something the "numismatists" at Frühwald did not get, or, as I believe, deliberately decided to ignore)

Same for the German Colonial countermarks on the Philippine pesos. An unheard-of, incredible find for German numismatics. Colonial coins have a very sound and strong collectors base in Germany - such an item would have sold in the tens of thousands. It did not sell at all. Nobody wanted it.

So Bob, I guess with this I am arguing a little bit against you. I do not think anybody would "risk" 1000-2000 euros on such coins, speculating on the chance they might turn out to be good and worth much more. And as much as I like counterfeits (and know by own experience that they sometimes can sell at more than the original), I doubt anybody would deliberately want to pay four-figure sums for modern forgeries.

I can think of only three scenaria:
A) somebody really got duped, trusting in the auction house. If this somebody cares to look at the results of the auction (many lots unsold, the others going just at or a little over the minimum bid), he or she should get suspicious

B) there were actually no sales, or at least less, but the auction house invented bids on some of the coins to hide that they received no offers

C) somebody bought them, knowing they are fakes, but also knows just the right customers with stupid money to sell them to,

Pick the scenario which frightens you less...

@Austowiki
"It is not clear whether this ebay item is a fake.. but nor is it clear that its genuine"

One of the things one has to accept as a collector of counterstamps is that in many times, it is impossible to establish whether a stamp is good "beyond any reasonable doubt". Even with blatant forgeries, people can argue against it ("it's just a different / used / damaged punch, that's why the features look different", "maybe you are right such a coin was not supposed to be counterstamped, but it might just have slipped through", "just because all other known counterstamps of this type are weakly and incompletely struck, it does not mean that this very strong strike could not have happened", "ok, so the stamp looks uncirculated and the coin worn, but maybe the coin was pulled from circulation shortly after the counterstamp was applied")

The only thing you can do is to buy only counterstamped coins that do not raise any suspicions. Any doubts you have, a prospective buyer in the future will surely have as well. I prefer to let one or two pass, even though they most likely are good as gold (and even though I might regret it dearly a few years later after I learned some more) than to settle for one that I don't feel perfectly comfortable with.

Many years ago, when I was still much more of a novice than I am today, I was offered a Mexican 8 Reales with the Siamese "Chakra" and "Mongkut" stamps at a coin show. A trustworthy old-time dealer. A nice coin. Just that the two stamps were in the wrong order. All the others I had seen (which at that time were only two in old World Coin catalogs and one in an auction catalog), the two stamps were placed the other way around. At least I thought so - I did not have the catalogs with me on the bourse floor. I deliberated the whole afternoon, came back twice, and finally decided against it.

I got home and found out that I was right, the stamps were placed differently. A few years later, somebody told me that there was no way any Siamese mint worker would have placed the two stamps in the wrong order, not even by mistake, because it would have been blatantly wrong (I don't understand any Asian signs, but I imagine it would be like stamping "01" instead of "10" as the value of the coin, or like "Screw the King" instead of "It's the Kings inherited right to screw you"). Maybe that information is wrong, but fact is that no good coins with the stamps in the wrong order are known. I was unsure, and this saved me from buying an almost certainly forged coin.

Now try to go back to this dealer, tell him that you bought that coin from him several years ago, and that you have come to the conclusion that it is a fake, because there are no others with the two punches in the wrong order. Good luck with that one!

Of course, even more numerous are the times when I let a perfectly good coin slip away, but that's another story...

I am intrigued by the possibility that the sold lots were not sold. I do buy from that company. In that last auction I did buy a piece that I have been hunting for a long time( 1777 MTT). I receive the catalogs and though I haven't researched them I do recall on a number of occasions seeing counter-marked coins) and thinking "thats like the one that sold in the last auction". I am only reporting an impression not a fact. For me it is surprising that almost all the genuine modern counter-stamped( Such as the 1984 Hafner counterstamp) MTT failed to attract bids.

Another observation(Reinforcing what has been said already): Some of the out of the way counter-marks on MTTs are from regions that are outside of the MTTs Circulation range. These would be major discoveries but like archaeological discoveries they need a solid provenance to be accepted. It is also very hard to accept such discoveries when there is nothing in numismatic literature on these counter-stamps before the 1950s-60s.

Many of the markets that used the MTT had very clear trading customs and ways to avoid counterfeits. The MTT was authenticated by a few key features....which are often obliterated by these counter-marks. Also buying involved customary bartering and then inspection of the "Coin" it would be expected by the purchaser that the seller would reject some coins. It is highly likely any counter-marked MTT would be the first rejected or alternately traded at a significant discount. This makes CM-MTT seem a little less likely and tends to confirm the best researched view that only Mozambique counter-marked MTT