I Found Another Counterfeit / Fake 1982 D Quarter.

Yuck!

You know that's not a Chinese counterfeit . What a piece of junk !

I have a "perverse" love of counterfeit coins. I know they are a problem for collectors, but I can appreciate the effort put forth trying to create them. I have hundreds of counterfeits in my black cabinet collection and am always looking to add more. Some are so laughable (like the one you posted), but others are so good it takes serious study and the help of my xrf scanner to determine them to be fakes.

This one is laughable.






This one on the other hand is good.

The half dollar looks very convincing.

If I got that half from a bank I wouldn't look twice.

I had the same thought

How like a coin collector to look at the face value of the coin, and not the business model.

Consider the life of a forged twenty dollar bill. You sell it to somebody who then needs to spend it, keeping the change and, maybe, salvaging something from whatever they bought with the bill. The yield is the change from the twenty, which limits how much someone is willing to pay for the twenty in the first place.

Consider the life of a forged quarter-dollar coin. The market is people who make change; either out of a cash register or, better yet, out of a vending machine. Their yield from a ten dollar roll of quarters is a full ten dollars.

One could also consider the security measures & monitoring in place for twenty-dollar bills, as opposed to those in place for quart-dollar coins.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, one of these markets is far more competitive than the other, further squeezing the yield.

Forgery is always a lot of trouble.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Right about the time that my father would take my older brother and a roll of nickels to an art museum, and the kid got a nickel every time he correctly named the artist.

Quite the incentive, in its day.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Assuming it was made in the early to mid 1980's as it's date might indicate, there may have been some method to his madness. At the time many coin acceptors for things like tollroads, coin counters and other automatic coin devices merely used size to determine value. Some coins might have been rejected by magnet-equipped machines but not all used them.

I had a friend who worked in the coin room of a large tollroad authority during this time who said they used to collect buckets full of slugs, foreign coins and even just plain cut round metal bits that were accepted by the roadside baskets. It looks like this guy took it one step further and at least made a (slight) effort to make it presentable. Most people wouldn't give that a second look unless it was rejected by a machine or handled by a collector.