New Counterfeit Threat - Fake NGC Holders!

This is one of the major reasons why I bought a XRF scanner. I know they are not in most peoples budget, but one or two mistakes like that and you could easily make the monthly payment on the machine.

All you have to do is go to pcgs or ngc and enter the numbers . You're then able to compare the ones your looking to buy with what's on their sites . Compare coin to coin, if it's fake it will be easy to tell . This has been going on for quite some time .

I saw a Liberty Standing quarter today in a NGC slab that if I had seen it raw I would swear was a replica because it was perfect beyond belief. I never saw a coin that old in that condition before in my life. I have confidence in the dealer that showed me the coin, but it does look too good to be true. If this guy can be faked out then we are all in trouble and will have to graduate to another level of security to be sure of coin's authenticity. I will check back on Friday and ask some more questions. I don't know if the slab and coin are fake, but it raises questions in my mind. It raised questions in the dealer's mind as well as we discussed it. It looked like a replica. It was too perfect.

Indeed, setting one of these up properly is going to be an investment. One scenario is this came out of China. If they opened their own molds and dies for replication, that can be a few thousand dollars for tooling, especially if they don't have their own very costly equipment and many injection molding places require runs of several thousand. 12,000 pcs is a very common minimum order if they are outsourcing the production of the slabs if they can't do it in house. Then there is the cost of the coin blanks, value based on whatever metal they go with in hopes it passes inspections too.

Let's just hope they haven't put 12,000 of these out there... it would take many years to find even just a good % because so many coins, especially modern bullion, is bought up by people who would never suspect it could be bogus and will just sit in box somewhere for the foreseeable future. Hopefully they don't have a distribution network that is capable of releasing so many, so fast and many of these are still in the counterfeiters inventory and authorities have time to stop it before they are "sold out".

The hobby turns through $10s of billions of dollars every year between those spending decent money on high grade modern bullion pcs and those chasing for those searching for elusive and rare classics. Unfortunately for us, with a sociopath it's a no-brainer to get in on that action.

Also, the preferred distribution method for those sort of forgeries is in batches with real coins in real slabs, similar to the technique used by thieves passing counterfeit currency. It plays on the human tendency to assume that if the first few X of something are real, then all X are probably real. A fake bill passer might have one or two counterfeit $20's in a stack of $2000 in 20's. The cashier will (hopefully) use the marker on the first few bills -- they are real, so he or she assumes they are probably all real and skips the rest.

I see about $2k-$5k cash in hand every day when counting the tills, and we have found a couple of fakes this way; the quality on some of them is easily sufficient to be unnoticeable without a close inspection. They have even successfully reproduced the metallic inks on the $20 notes, and the little insert strips, as well as the pastel colors; however, compared to real $20s, the details tend to be very weak and mushy, and a lot of times, the subtle variations/gradations in color are either absent entirely or over-emphasized. I've got one I keep at my desk at work in a holder which is printed on a bleached $1 bill; another is made from gluing a face side and a reverse side together -- they are printed separately (single-sided) to avoid tell-tale ink bleed through to the other side of the paper. The only reason I found the one made in such a method was because the counterfeiter did a poor job of cutting the sheet, and one side was cut slightly angular, allowing the other side's blank back to show up.

My cashiers use " Counterfeit Detection pens." They leave a mark which changes color if a fake bill comes through. I also have a ultraviolet light that you can pass bills under, that is also used for driver licenses.

A lot of times they don't get detected until they get rejected by the bank when the deposit is turned in from the armored car.

We call the police if we catch one "in the wild" but the police 1) don't care about an individual passing a single fake bill or two and 2) don't have any desire to keep or examine the bill, telling us to keep it or shred it.

And yes, that technology (atomic tagging/nanodots) would result in a cost increase for slabbing, but the upfront investment cost would be spread out over the number of slabs, making it a manageable cost increase.

Example: You spend a million bucks on a widget machine; you can then sell a single widget for $1 million to get your money back, or sell a million widgets for $1.