Fake/Counterfeit 1897 Liberty V Nickel

Any casting seam on the edge?

This is a *gorgeous* counterfeit. But the date... oh the date... :-)

The scary thing is the coin looks good EXCEPT for the date.
Any collector of these nickels would immediately notice the enlargement of the date.
And not much of a case can be made that this is a contemporary counterfeit* of the era as the coin looks brand new.
Another mystery ...

*Counterfeited to pass as a nickel during the time when these nickels were current.

You can see it easily once you start looking closely - things which ought to be sharp if other things are, aren't, and there are places where the intersection between device and field is clearly suspect.

Seeing the up-close pictures, this one was certainly struck, not cast. The master die was probably made from a genuine nickel via a transfer process or even CNC scanning.

The date, however, I simply cannot account for. They probably were hand-punching them or adding them on to the initial scan to make the whole series, which is much easier/lazier than scanning a coin of each year/mm. :-)

Very often they'll re-use reverse dies over multiple years for the same reason (which leads to type mismatches, but also a means to easily test if it's from the same manufacturer via die markers; this is how the infamous Micro-O Morgans got caught).

Excellent fake less the obvious date ... the close up photos of the raised tooling marks and dots confirm all opinions of a reasonably well executed counterfeit ...

Well execute of course except for the date!

Please share how you came across this example.

David

No one has seen the "wacky date" variety of 1897 Liberty head nickels?

JK, of course.