Is This Legit?

Actually there is one. Hmm I can't believe I can't find a reference to it on-line. Found it

The most curious of all counterfeit Bust dollars is one I haven't seen in person but have read about in Don Taxay's 1966 book Counterfeit, Mis-Struck, and Unofficial U.S. Coins and in an article by David Thompson in the October 29, 1991, Numismatic News. Taxay described and pictured a Bust dollar dated 1805, a "masterpiece of deception" made from an earlier authentic 1803 dollar in which the 3 in the date was tooled into a 5.

The coin first surfaced in 1939 at the British Museum and initially fooled even the noted early dollar expert M.H. Bolender and two testing labs, Academy Testing Laboratories of New York and Lucius Pitkin of New York, who all pronounced it genuine, although others, including Walter Breen and B.G. Johnson, recognized it as an altered coin. Bolender was fooled because the counterfeiter, along with expertly altering the date, had expertly tooled the stars, shaving metal from them and reworking the ends and sides in order to mask the fact that the fake was based on an 1803 Bolender 6 variety.

It wasn't until Eric P. Newman, author of the 1962 book The Fantastic 1804 Dollar, pronounced the coin as fake at a talk at the 1961 ANA convention, describing in detail the fakery employed, that the matter was put to rest. Apparently the rationale for the fake was the fact that genuine Bust dollars were indeed minted in 1805, reportedly 321 pieces, though all of those pieces are believed to have been dated 1803 or earlier. In the early 1960s this 1805 piece was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred J. Ostheimer III, renowned silver dollar collectors.


The actual explanation for the 321 silver dollars "struck" in 1805 can be found in the mint records where a bullion deposit for foreign coin from the Bank of the United States was found to contain 321 US dollars. These were just turned over to the Coiner without being melted down and recoined. The rest of the deposit was coined into half dollars are no dollar coins were being struck by Executive order of Thomas Jefferson.