High Quality, New Generation Forgery? 1914-1918 Chinese Silver Yuan

Looks like an improved fake of mine, mine is a counterfeit too.

newguy22 The coin is without any doubt a numismatic forgery. So you are precisely correct - not paranoid. As you say it is fairly well made, but it has many of the same kinds of signs that come along with the forgeries coming from China and elsewhere. Some of these clues are the old standbys - lumps in the fields and small errors in how the coin was made. But some clues are far more subtle and take many years of experience to notice. These clues tend to get passed along expert to expert.

One thing I have learned is that there will always be counterfeits and forgeries because there are always a supply of new buyers to be fooled. So the best we (collectors) can hope for is to limit the profit available to forgers through education of collectors so that the poorest made forgeries no longer sell well.

Making more believable forgeries that fool most collectors costs more per coin and frankly eliminates many common coins as targets. Some forgers are simply unable to make quality forgeries and so they turn to other things. The forgers who have the ability and are willing to invest more money in their product are forced to turn to ever more expensive targets.

One thing I've noticed about these sellers of high quality fakes is that they never fail to touch a rare expensive coin with their fingers!!!
There's a guy on ebay numisvlora, who also has a secondary account, also sells high quality Chinese fakes for a song and somehow gets negative feedback removed by ebay.
I'm an amateur, but there's something about the heavy toning in the reeded edge that bothers me. Something unnatural.

The Chinese can get these within the same weight as the make these in silver as well. With such a expensive coin, it makes you wonder why its not in a PCGS or NGC holder.....I wouldn't touch it at all.

Sadly, the piece has sold for $510.

That is an extremely good fake. Many will be fooled by it. Color looks good, even the wear pattern looks original. My guess it is even silver, unlike Numister's example.

My guess is that the people who made this counterfeit had an actual Yuan ShiKai silver yuan to make the molds and dies from, and then used actual silver from either bullion or junk to make the planchets. It could be a good idea to keep an image of this coin in your files in case anyone here comes across another example and wants to check if both pieces match in details, especially regarding the wear patterns and scratch/bag marks. I've seen in other forums where people are able to identify very good counterfeits based on matching scratch and wear patterns. A fake from the same producers will show identical wear and scratch marks, patterns that should be unique for each individual coin. Regarding coloring, my guess would be that there are chemicals and lab procedures that can be done in a laboratory to speed up the "wear effect." A lot of the tech and chemicals needed to achieve this can probably be bought pretty cheaply in China, or any country that's invested in counterfeiting valuable coins.