Reality Check: Hong Kong And Chinese Dollars

xshift- Yeah, these things just make one sick. But at least they look so bad that most people who are collectors of Chinese coins will be able to spot them easily. I just wish that counterfeiting laws were much stricter in the states.

It appears to me that measuring weight of a coin (or a slab coin) can quickly detect a fake one. Can this method identify most of fake coins? I am a new coin collector.

I bought a book entitled "Numismatic forgery" recently. I hope to learn more about this topic soon.

Based on my books, it seems only the weight and the diameter of the coin are listed and no thickness of the coin is mentioned.

dollarcoins You are starting with a great book. Larson's "Numismatic Forgery" is the best single book on the subject that is available today. I only wish it had been available years ago.

Thank you for the valuable suggestions. I purchased most of my coins from the ebay in the past. Now I am not so comfortable to bid on coins with the price over $100 due to the fake coin issue. I hope to improve my knowledge (and common sense); thus, I can bid with confidence on the ebay.

Apart from weight, the coins all have several things in common. One, which you start to get used to, is the colour. It just doesn't look right for a silver coin. Many of them will have some evidence of casting- not usually the whole coin, but often in the field close to design elements, or in small areas of the design. The pimples are quite evident with a glass, and sometimes, without one. The fields are often tooled,so that they look shiny, but the lack of detail is a give away. The weaknesses around the rim/denticles/dots seems to be a common problem. A number of impossible obv/rev combinations exist- the one Chinese dollar is Hupeh on the English side, and Fengtien on the Chinese side. There are impossible US Trade dollar dates, and many other interesting concoctions. I got 14 different at one show alone. (I Paid $1 each). I got one that was a 1927 Chinese Sun Yat Sen dollar, that had belonged to the vendor's mother, who died in 1960. I told him that she must have been a very interesting ghost, because these coins ere not made until about 1990, so she must have been good at time travel. These types of coins are not limited to crown -sized coins. I have seen the same type of product in Chinese, Hong Kong, and other Asian 5 and 10 cent "silver" coins. Use a glass if the colour is wrong, or the details are mushy. You might save a bundle. More scary are the good-quality reproductions of more modern struck coins. There has been a real push against counterfeit Canadian "coins" which come from the same source, but are 100 times better. These also exist from many of the countries of the world. It is a very big operation in China. I have heard 7 manufacturing plants exist that turn out these coins. They also issue fake Chinese bank notes- the ones I have seen are some of the priciest of the Chinese series- for example the 1,000,000 Customs Gold Unit bill, and many others. These are made on machines that are either original, or made to work like the originals. If the metal is right, and the dies are good, they can be major problems. I think we have just seen the tip of the iceberg.