Buy Your Copies Of Ancient Silver Coins Here!

These are easy to spot as fakes by most collectors. But they can be passed off to less experienced collectors as originals by some dishonest seller. They should be marked on the coin copy, they are not. IMO this is fraud.

In Spain we have a lot of these (XXXXXX!)...
But here is not illegal at all!
If you copy a circulating coin, you´ll visit the jail for a while, but if is a coin actually not in circulation...
...you are free to do that!
THESE (XXXXX) ARE KILLING OUR HOBBY!

(I have sustituted a lot of spanish insults for XXXX, if anyone want to know, he can visit any spanish coin forum and look for "fake")

Regardless of any moral considerations (it's despicable), he's not going to last long.

if any of you new collectors have lurked on this thread and it's isn't very obvious to you that these are fake coins, you need to stay off ebay for your coin purchases.

yeah, it's kind of weird. if I were the king of ebay I would make them put "replica" in the listing title as well, it's seems they are hiding that in the "fine print" so to speak. also I would like them to be marked in someway to clearly show they are copies or fakes. but man, it hard to not spot those as fakes. it would almost be like making them put "this is a fake piano" on their silver piano necklaces. and they are selling them in the costume jewelry price range, not in the price ranges of the ancient coins they depict. so, I have mixed feelings.

you must see all those small, round bubbles on all the surface, the "dull" appearence of the surface, the different colour (if it´s fine silver) with the colour of one genuine denarius of that epoch (made from much more debased silver)...
I have an idea...
I think that I have that type of denarius, I´m going to take an image to compare

Wayne Sayles who has put out and entire series of books on ancient coins has a book on fake coins which is a very good read. The book isn't expensive around $25 and you can probably find a copy on ebay.

It is well worth while to know how to identify a fake that has been struck from copy dies off a genuine coin, that has the same alloy as the genuine coin. This type of approach to fake production understandably produces some of the most dangerous fakes, and there is no substitute for experience in the handling of these.

Good quality fake American gold coins are often made in this way.

The best fakes are made in exactly the same way as the originals were made, that is, using the same methods, including hand die cutting for ancient coins. These fakes are usually spotted because of the fact that the modern hand die cutter is not of the same cultural mentality as his ancient counterpart, and it comes out in the tiny differences in the way the dies are cut.

Other modern methods include laser optic profiling of a coin into a digital model, the information of which is used to cut a die by the spark erosion method. These fakes have their own characteristic copy 'signatures' but they are very dangerous if you haven't seen one of these copies, and haven't been told what you are looking at.

Cast copies, by comparison, are reasonably easy to identify except with ancient coins which the genuine ones which may have acquired porosity from their burial. Some tests, such as comparative ring tone testing as with most ancient coins, is irrelevent.