1736 Pillar Dollar-Need Your Comments For Study

First let me be upfront, I don't/won't buy any 8's off ebay any more unless it is a seller I am very familiar with and have bought coins face to face from at a coin show. I just got tired of sending back fakes and problem coins so I made that my policy.

As for this coin, I would pass, I don't like the way the obverse details look. They seem mushy to me and just don't look "rght". I would hold out for a sharper strike.

This is some of the best advice for everyone on the forum interested in 8 Reales.

I have sent all but one 8 Reale back that I bought on ebay. The one I have kept is from a reputable dealer I trust.

The coin is a nice forgery with perhaps one of the best edges I have seen yet. The edging priority seems clearly incorrect for 1736 and there is a large dot over the 7 - so even in the small format pictures presented I would spot it as a fake.

The other features are executed very well. The story of inheritance does not work since that is an all too common part of many swindles.

That said I would likely bid $35 which is my absolute limit for modern Dos Mundos - but I would only bid on the first oen I saw. I am assembing a date set of modern counterfeit Mexican 8Rs and I don't have a believable 1736 yet. I own two forgeries of that date but both fall outside the "believable" criteria.

Pandesalapi I tend to agree with your assessment of forgeries on ebay. Last July I began tracking every auction posted under Mexico in the coin section of ebay. I have been tracking statistics on just how many coins of each type were posted and how many were counterfeits. (So far, I have looked at nearly 140,000 auctions). I track Cap and Ray coins in complete detail and Cob, Pillar and Portrait in brief overview. I plan to assemble the data and put it on the forum when it passes 1 year.

The Pillar dollars actually are nearer 75% fake (some days as high as 100% are bogus) - Portrait 8Rs are about 30 - 40% fake (with many suspicious but uncertain) and Cap and Rays are under 15%. I do not track cob forgeries because I do not consider myself good at spotting forgeries in that group using only pictures.

But the raw numbers of Counterfeits tell only part of the story - the division of Contemporaneous Counterfeits versus Modern Forgeries is critical. Modern fakes are JUNK - essentially scrap metal so unless they are real silver they have limited value. Contemporaneous Counterfeits on the other hand are very valuable to specialists if they are rare.

There have been 0% Contemporaneous Counterfeit Pillar 8Rs posted in 48 weeks - NOT EVEN ONE. That means every single coin that I labeled a fake 75% of all Pillar dollars - I also considered to be MODERN and essentially worthless ($35 limit for a specialist).

The Portrait coins fared better with about 20% of Portrait 8R counterfeits being Contemporaneous. Put another way, about 6% of all Portrait 8Rs are early VALUABLE forgeries while 24% ARE WORTHLESS and 70% are probably real.

Cap and Ray issues present your best chance of getting a Contemporaneous Counterfeit or a REAL coin with 27% of the postings being Contemporaneous. The numbers for the total of 8R listings break down as 3% Contemporaneous 10% Modern and 87% real. So you have a 9 out of 10 shot of getting a collectible coin on ebay if you bid on Cap and Ray 8Rs - while you have only a 1 in 4 chance in Pillar Dollars.

My project started out of curiosity and just became a habit. I already looked at every Mexican auction as well as several other searches every day. So I was spending the time, but not tracking my results. I was curious to see how rare the old counterfeit varieties actually were on ebay. So while I was checking auctions, I began to track each type I saw on a scratch sheet. This grew into notes in a bound ledger book which I then transferred to a spreadsheet on my PC. I now am in the habit of doing this daily. Over time the record has become more and more complex.

One thing I have learned after 48 weeks of tabulating data is that everything seems to average out over time. The averages that I had after 20 weeks of collecting data have remained ROCK solid since that time. The numbers seem to be increasing but the ratios are essentially CONSTANT over time.

I chart results on a 24 hour cycle based on posting time 20:00 hours to 20:00. I selected the time of day based on the peak number of postings. I do my review between 11PM and 12AM EST each day if I can. If I skip a day, I can simply break out the data into daily blocks when I catch up. I exclude the REPLICA coins because they are a nuisance and would only artificially inflate the numbers of counterfeits.

I list the number of postings of coins for each denomination coin (half are through 8R) Cob, Pillar, Portrait and Cap & Ray. But I focus on Cap and Ray types where I have 14 data fields. The spreadsheet does all the calculations for total numbers of coins and for percentage of counterfeits. I distinguish between coins the seller identifies as forgeries and the ones that are NOT identified as fakes - but actually are fake. I also track known Chinese forgeries as a distinct sub-category so these can be isolated and removed.

The purpose of all this is to have factual data on counterfeit populations. About 15 years ago I had a discussion with one of the "experts" on Colonial contemporaneous counterfeits in Boston who stated DOGMATICALLY that Colonial Contemporaneous Counterfeits were FAR RARER than similar coins of the early Republican era. I didn't believe him based on my experience at coin shows, but he was the EXPERT. My findings on ebay absolutely refute that belief. I think it was simply a case of an expert being so focused on one area (his preferred area) that he "assumed facts" that fit his personal wish list.

My data from ebay demonstrates conclusively that Portrait 8Rs are 4 times as common on ebay as early Republican issues and that Contemporaneous Counterfeits of the early Republican issues are actually 2 1/2 times scarcer than their Portrait counterparts.

Colonial counterfeits are far more popular than Republican with far higher prices but if rarity were the only criteria it would be the other way around. All I can do is to spread the word based on the facts and see what happens.