Are Fakes Being Unwittingly Sold As Genuine Coins

Every single coin listed on The Black Cabinet (as well as roughly twice as many in the uncatalogued stacks) passed at least once as genuine before they ended up in the collection.

Fakes being sold as genuine are epidemic.

The diamagnetic ("opposite") pull exerted upon silver only happens when the magnetic field is in motion, which is why if you have a very strong neodymium magnet, you can "pick up" a silver coin with it. However, once the coin's velocity matches the magnet's velocity, the pull equalizes and it won't "stick." To get it to "stay" there, you'd have to pull the magnet away from the face of the coin at a constant acceleration (which is quite high).

However, this is useful for telling apart non-magnetic fakes as you can take a smaller neodymium magnet and slide it down the surface of the coin through a flip. If it's a slow slide, it's silver (or another diamagnetic material). If it slides off quickly (like with brass) you know it's the wrong metal. :-)

This thread has me checking and rechecking every coin in my collection. I just bought a BU 1941 Merc and I bet I've looked at that thing under the loupe with suspicion about 100 times lol.

To catch off metal fakes. While some can be found with refrigerator magnet only about 1/2 of the ones we handle can be found with those.(or 15lb.retriever )
Not all fakes will fail. Just ones with a Ferromagnetic, or Para-magnetic metal alloy at a high % in them will stick.

You can buy an array from us or build your own array with 9 or 16 n52 (5mm or 10mm )cubes in it.
Arranged in a checkerboard pattern and backed (epoxied)to a mild steel plate. I like to use a Chinese coin (for the irony )
2 tests of the magnets power.
A completed array will pick up a silver War Nickel ( 9% manganese) or US paper money (magnetic ink)
If your magnet can not do this it is not powerful enough to catch some magnetic fakes. Not all off metal fakes are magnetic however, and a different class of instrument is required like XRF, specific gravity, or TFDwall.

You need to be suspicious about ALL coins. I've seen fakes in TPG slabs and, of course, there are also fake slabs. If there's a way to steal money, some piece of garbage will do it.

Fakes are just a part of collecting and they will always be. In fact, IMO, it's getting worse every year. The dealers I know will tell you hundreds of stories each about fakes they've seen.

It is if you think it will go back up, it isn't if you think it will keep dropping. What it is actually going to do is anybody's guess, and many of them will be wrong.

Just to back BadThad's comments up, say "hello" to Morgan:



"Hello, Morgan." :-)

The micro O's are probably contemporary counterfeits from the early 20th century. There is at least one article from back around the turn of the 20th century that warned of counterfeit New Orleans dollars and the diagnostic them mentioned was that they had a very small lowercase O mintmark. (At that time silver had dropped so low that even using full metal weight had less than 50 cents worth of metal in them.)