Counterfeit Gold 50 Peso

A very interesting question. Do you have any idea when the forgery was made?

I decided to buy the coin for 5% under melt based on the calculated gold content. I did the Specific Gravity myself and confirmed it within + - 0.05. It was headed for the melting pot and it is a shame to destroy such a nice looking coin even if it is fake. So now I own it.

The coin is struck - no doubt whatsoever on that point. The blank used was cast. There are numerous TINY surface folds in the metal on one side pointing to an open mold casting. It also point to a very slow pour into the mold. There are two partial "seams" on the edge. These are visible to the naked eye and are rather large - on the order of 1/2 mm. The edge has been filed after casting to remove most of the evidence of casting. There are no entrained air bubbles. The strike is weak at the center of the coin with fewer details transferring. But the center is polished to remove surface details that would point to a casting. Polishing the blank before striking is a good way to produce a nice looking forgery.

The coin was purchased at auction (in person - not ebay) where it was represented as the real thing. It was sold in a holder that obscured the edge and true weight. Removed from the holder it is obviously much too thin. There was no attempt at applying the proper edge inscription. The buyer (actually a member of Congress) is not a coin collector but was "investing in Gold". He has held the coin for "some time" but I have no real idea of how long it was in his possession.

I wondered about the coin being either Italian or Lebanese before I saw it. However, based on other examples I have seen, it is neither of those. Most Lebanese copies (I have handled MANY fake soverigns) are made with dies that do not resemble this one. The die surfaces here are far better. The die has no clear evidence of manufacture method. Most Lebanese forgeries have obvious die problems when magnified. It is also not the typical Italian die pair either.

I did locate a loose small flake that exposes an "inclusion" in the metal. It is a tiny spot of metal melted into the gold matrix. The spot which measures at most 1/4 mm in diameter is a silver gray color - possibly a small bit of platinum. The gold surface under the flake is clearly what you see on a jeweler's salvage bar - I have handled a few of those. So my suspicion is that it was fabricated from salvaged jewelry or some other "scrap" gold.

I did speak to a metalurgist about the possibility of an alloy or gold overlay of Tungsten. The SG of Tungsten is in the right range. That would be a gray metal (but a bit darker that the gray we saw in the binocular microscope) but his opinion was that while you could possibly cast a blank using tungsten - you could never get it to strike up as well as this one did. There are clear flow lines at the perimeter and the lettering has struck up very well.