* Reales With Bank Of England Counter Stamp.

DOSMUNDOS To comment a bit further on disclosure of forgery errors and clues.

There are some facts that I will disclose - those are facts that it would be difficult or impossible for the forgers to correct without pricing themselves out of the market. Remember a fact of life - to stay in business a forger has to sell his wares for more than they cost to make and they have to sell enough of them to pay the help - themselves included. Forgers do not work to break even. If we can get them closer to that point they will stop.

So one way to drive out low tier forgers is by exposing errors like the ones that I do all the time. Coins must be the right weight and density. Coins must not be magnetic. They must be made correctly. Dies must be made correctly. The edges must be applied correctly, etc, etc..

By the time all of those errors are corrected by the forgers you will have driven 90% of forgers out of business.

But even though much of this data is well known and discussed all the time. The 1882 Zs 8 Reales Chinese piece of junk STILL SELLS. There are an average of 30 PER MONTH sold on ebay alone. So we are still working at a super low general level of understanding of forgery.

But as people get better in tune with forgery - more clues can be given as long as the new information makes it HARDER (more costly) to make a better forgery.

One of the best clues of this class is the composition of the alloy. The tests that can be done at present with XRF and SEM are able to disclose trace contaminants that prove or disprove age of the metal used in many cases.

Disclosing those facts will not aid low tier forgers at all. They can always get their own data by having one original coin scanned anyway. The problem they face is replicating the precise accidental composition in use say in 1795 in Mexico and doing it with metals refined today.

Attempting to comply with just gold as a trace contaminant would prove very difficult for even the best forgers. Their best approach would be to do it by by melting real coins to make their blanks. But there are not enough junk real coins to do that without driving costs far above spot for the raw materials. It also means forgers will use up the supply of junk coins rather quickly - then what do they do?

However, lets say for argument sake that a forger secures enough old junk real coins for a production run. How do they make the blanks? If they use the wrong type of furnace or crucible to make their alloy by rendering old coins they ABSOLUTELY will introduce certain OTHER contaminants found in modern furnace linings and crucibles that do not belong. They actually need to duplicate in all respects an 18th century refinery using only original materials (that were also refined in the correct way from native ores containing the correct natural contaminants). Recent XRF tests have revealed many post 1900 counterfeits because of furnace lining contaminants that were NOT USED until after 1940. A trace of 20 PPM of certain modern rare earth metals is enough to condemn a coin as a forgery in some instances. Twenty ppm is 0.000020.

Duplicating the alloy from modern "pure" metals has been suggested. The trouble is the metals purchased today are not pure enough (99.999980) to make an alloy from scratch. Not even the silver or gold is actually pure enough. In addition, these new raw metals likely come from different areas of the planet where different trace contaminants are present. 99.999 fine Silver is standard which leaves 200 ppm as contaminants and who knows what those are?

This gets even more critical when dealing with very minute traces of Iridium or Arsenic or Molybdenum which have to be there in some cases and not in others. But the biggest issue is likely to be the copper. The question is where (today) would you find 99.99998 fine copper - no one refines to that standard. Most PURE copper is 99.9% or even 99%. The 0.1 missing contains a myriad of junk that simply is the wrong junk for Mexican copper in 1795.

Contamination of gold, silver and platinum with superconducting rare earth elements (from metal recovered from electronic components)is another serious problem for a forger seeking perfection of alloy using modern metals.

It would cost so much to create the perfect alloy that as of this time, I believe it is IMPOSSIBLE given the cost constraints placed on forgers. A $50 XRF test would disclose the forgery for what it is. So high end coins are out. Low tier coins can not be made cheaply enough.

Forgers will be forced to take short cuts that are exposed by scientific tests but not by visual inspection.

Therefore trace metal contaminants can and should be disclosed once the ranges are completely determined.

However, this applies only to the made from scratch fakes not the re-stamped originals.

A Bank of England fake that starts with a real coin has a myriad of advantages over a made from scratch fake. The ONLY thing that makes the coin SUPER valuable is the stamp impression.

The stamp impression leaves NO trace contamination behind. It leaves NOTHING of itself behind only the minute details. So all you really have is application pressure, the stamp design itself and post re-strike wear. There are NO OTHER CLUES available.

The simple errors made in cutting a privy die should NOT be disclosed, in my opinion. They are too valuable as a tool for identification of fakes.

Some of the original privy stamps still exist. How would anyone recognize a "restrike" made from one of the original punches? Answer - Only by the application method and wear. Both of those clues tend to be subjective and are known to vary. So they are never quite definitive.

So until the forger sees and corrects his own errors, I will not be the one to publish those errors and allow him to make a perfect copy. A perfect punch applied with a perfect pressure and then slowly worn and artificially patenated would be nearly IMPOSSIBLE to diagnose as a forgery.

This leads me to my inevitable conclusion.

No one should buy a coin with a George III counter stamp on ebay or anywhere else unless they are PERSONALLY capable of confirming the Privy Stamp configuration for themselves or they have hired someone with that capability.

Educating all collectors to even be able to spot the errors in the stamp would prove much more difficult than you suspect. It is not as simple as a 1916D Mercury dime or a 1909 S VDB cent - they are both made with far larger dies which are far more complex. The privy stamp is much smaller, single sided and contains very few features.

Personally, at this point, I would recommend XRF tests for all 8R coins to eliminate counterfeits made after 1830 and TPG inspections for all counter-stamped pieces. Baring that level of expertise NO ONE IS SAFE in this market.

dosmundos I certainly hope they have the expertise.

The problem is the pressure they are under to do things quick, quick, quick. My current boss (I still work part time) was a grader for one of the big three for a time and he hated it. Remember that now I authenticate for him on a part time basis. He is competent at identifying US counterfeits (especially the rarities - he has memorized all of the required characteristics) but once exposed to a coin he is not intimately familiar with he loses confidence in himself. I learned from one of the best a dealer educated in the school of hard knocks from 1930 to 1970 before most of the books were written. He taught me to never get caught up in minutia until you assess the general issues first.

Most forgers get the details right but miss context and overview of how coins were made.

I think modern graders are too reliant on high resolution photos and high tech instruments that GIVE them answers. The new instruments are GREAT to confirm your opinion but for me they come as a secondary proof to quiet the doubters. When I walk by a dealers table I review the coins quickly - counterfeits always jump out. Sometimes I don't know why until I really study them. But those are the contemporary forgeries.

The more modern high quality Numismatic Forgeries can be difficult. But I always try to remember what "the Don" said about Knowing before you ask why. A good authenticator "knows" before he understands why something is wrong. Authentication is mostly observation and instinct based on years of experience.

But back to the question can the TPG's get it right. The answer is definitely yes provided they follow their own policies. Each grader has an area or areas of expertise. Outside that area coins go to what is effectively a committee for review by a panel. Last I knew the vote need unanimity or near unanimity for authentication. Split votes resulted in no action. In really tricky cases there is an expert appeal process (which you have to pay extra for) I had to use that route to get a discovery piece graded a few years ago. No one had ever seen this particular coin before but I knew it was real. For 50 extra it was submitted to the experts. I know the elder Ponterio was involved because I heard from him later.

The Resellos should all fall in the "review" category at a minimum and many should be handled with expert appeals ONLY.

The problem I see is an unwillingness of the TPGs to focus on doing the job right versus a bottom line approach of getting it done fast.

In the end, I prefer to authenticate my own. At least I trust myself.

Henry - The Class 1 counterfeits - the Contemporary Circulating Counterfeits of Portrait 8 Reales can be rather easily identified by visual clues and by errors made by the makers. They are not a problem to discover and they do not need XRF tests in most cases. We document some 530 varieties in our book.

The same thing applies to most of the modern Numismatic Forgeries - the coins made to fool collectors. These coins can also be identified normally without resorting to XRF tests.

The statement as made in what you quote was overly broad. All 8R Portrait coins of Charles III and IV dated before 1811 and bearing a Mexico City mint mark should be tested to be absolutely sure they are original. Since the thread dealt with a George III counter-stamp my thinking was limited to the coins that were counterstamped by the Bank of England. But for someone with a more general interest in the series I now realize the statement could be misleading. I am sorry for that.

One of the issues that came up in research for our book is that an enormous number of silver restrikes of the Carolus Dollar types with the Mo mint mark were made for use in China AFTER 1830. The number runs into the tens of millions of coins at the very least.

Most of these restrikes can NOT be recognized from visual clues alone. The very existance of these coins has almost been totally forgotten (or intentionally ignored). They were at one time failry well known by both the numismatic and banking communities worldwide. But with the passage of time they were forgotten. For that reason, today the restrikes are treated by most collectors as if they were originals.

Simply put they have been forgotten.

Our book tries to correct that historical oversight and we are attempting to identify the clues that a collector who prefers to own an original coin might use to distinguish betweebn an original and a restrike.

It is as if no one remembered that Maria Theresa coins had been restruck for 200 years so that now all MTTs are treated as real.

The ONLY way at present to be 100% sure of which type you have is by XRF test. Our book does document some visual clues but not all examples have these clues.

As I said above, the Contemporary Counterfeits are actually far easier to identify than the later silver Restrikes.

So to identify this new group, we have actually had to create an entirely new class of Counterfeits by definition to accomodate these coins.

By any objective standard, these coins are Counterfeits. Period. Production started about 1830 and continued until 1930. So they are NOT as old as they claim to be. NONE that we are aware of were actually made in Mexico so the country of origin is different. None of the restrikes ever had official approval or sanction by the government of Spain who authorized the originals.

We refer then as Class 2 Counterfeits.

So for Portrait 8R coins there are three different Counterfeit types not two as is the case with Most coins.

It is this middle type of counterfeits, the Class 2 coins that form a large part of the book itself and that class of counterfeit is what we are hopeful will set oour book apart from the average book on coin forgery.

It is a subject that needs to be addressed - it did happen and we provide the proof of that contention.

So to be perfectly clear what I meant was that to be 100% certain that a Portrait 8R coin dated between 1772 and 1811 from the Mexico City mint is real - it will require an XRF test.

The Carolus III coins are far scarcer than the Carolus IV - the later dates 1795 on Predominate, but virtually all dates are known to exist.

I am likely the only person who has posted anything about this subject recently in a coin context. I started in 2000 posting about it heavily to try to draw out others who were aware of the situation. After 12 years I have gotten very few contacts from people researching along the same lines.

The book will be the first publication on the subject in well about 100 years.

I agree with you that the 1821 Zs coin was extensively counterfeited but I can find nothing to support the idea that they were used in the same manner as the Carolus coins. It may be that the Zs coins were just easy to forge because of the lack of a standard. They were circulating as money in the US until (1857) and several other countries much later so forgeries using 60 or 70% silver would have still been profitable. But 90% counterfeits are not as likely to exist as I once thought. Most XRF tested examples fall under 70%. That was a revelation to me.

So the 1821 Zs forgeries are Class 1 not Class 2.