Posted 09/30/2009 05:51 am
The thing is, "counterfeit" cash coins are made for all sorts of reasons; the cheap, shoddy, obvious-at-first-glance machine struck types are sold to tourists. Others are made in the traditional way for use in traditional rituals such as funeral ceremonies, as lucky charms, and for other purposes.
In my limited experience, the "style" of some of the coins in this particular lot looks a little suspect, and then there's the "bait-and-switch" tactic you mentioned earlier. But what seems to often occur with these bulk lots, especially if the seller has multiple sources, is you find a mixture of fakes and real coins since, as echizento pointed out, it's just as easy to buy a bunch of genuine coins than it is to make a bunch of fakes.
Personally, I prefer to let the dealers do the bulk buying, then rummage through the resulting "Cash coins $2 each" scratchtray (and most of the dealers around here have one of those), looking for odd mints or scarcer reigns and leaving behind anything I think looks dubious. Or, even better, let the cash coins expert in my coin club do the rummaging for me. He's been collecting them for decades and his eye for spotting fakes rarely lets him down.
In my limited experience, the "style" of some of the coins in this particular lot looks a little suspect, and then there's the "bait-and-switch" tactic you mentioned earlier. But what seems to often occur with these bulk lots, especially if the seller has multiple sources, is you find a mixture of fakes and real coins since, as echizento pointed out, it's just as easy to buy a bunch of genuine coins than it is to make a bunch of fakes.
Personally, I prefer to let the dealers do the bulk buying, then rummage through the resulting "Cash coins $2 each" scratchtray (and most of the dealers around here have one of those), looking for odd mints or scarcer reigns and leaving behind anything I think looks dubious. Or, even better, let the cash coins expert in my coin club do the rummaging for me. He's been collecting them for decades and his eye for spotting fakes rarely lets him down.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
