The Last Place I'd Expect To Find A Counterfeit

Agree, I'd love to find something like this, fake or not!

Genuine selas (Jewish tetradrachms) were quite roughly made; given that they were overstruck on foreign tetradrachms, this is only to be expected. They are rarely nice and round, and never have the nice clear rim on both sides that this coin has.

As for what it's doing in the dirt somewhere in rural America, let's just file that under "people are weird". Maybe someone buried it as part of a treasure hunt. Maybe someone was given it in Sunday school and lost it. Maybe someone bought it in Israel thinking it was real, came home, was told it's a replica, and literally threw it away in disgust. Maybe someone's deliberately planting fake coins where people might find them, just for LOLs or to try to create "evidence" for whatever weird ancient alien conspiracy they want to see promoted. Unless you were there or know who lost it, there's no way to tell.

Deliberately planting fake coins for other people to find is a standard operating procedure for scammers in the Middle East: for a fee, the tourists get taken to a "ruin nobody else knows about", and when they get there the ground is littered with old coins, which the tourists can find and help themselves to. But the "ruin" is likely less than a hundred years old, and the coins were all seeded there the previous day. Nobody tells the tourists that actual 2000 year old lost coins are going to be buried under quite a lot of dirt.

These were originally struck on Roman coins. Given their rarity and value the only place you'll find them in the ground is the Middle East. In fact, some were recently found in the Judaean Desert!
https://www.gov.il/en/pages/rare-co...-4-mar-2024#

Jewish family heirloom given to the black sheep son as a good luck token.

He decides to move to Montana and become a cowboy. Carries it with him everywhere.

Gets thrown from his horse one day and walks away unscathed, attributing his good fortune to that heirloom coin / good luck token.

But, unbeknownst to him, it has fallen out of his pocket (and it was a fake).

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it

Looks like a lucrative "Oak Island" tv spin-off waiting to happen! Have your people contact their people.