Swamperbob Got Fooled - Again

Lately I have seen quite a few posts complimenting my "skills" in the area of spotting counterfeit and altered coins. I want to thank the members who have made the comments, but I am far from perfect in that regard and even after 48 years of collecting, I still get fooled by coins in photographs and sometimes in person.

I wanted to show one that just came in the mail. I was fooled totally.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...190012950285

The coin was obviously artificially toned. But I believed it was done to cover an alteration. The seller - Anthony Torra of Revere is not a suspect in this possible deception. I don't want anyone to think that he was. He is a great guy to deal with. You see, I know the primary source of most of his Mexican coins and that source handles numerous alterations and forgeries. When I lived in New England this other dealer was a great source for forgeries because he tended to buy anything and everything and he got fooled A LOT! The source and I go back about 35 years, so I won't mention his name. He is a very good friend and he would never intentional defraud anyone. But he is the kind of dealer who doesn't really believe in counterfeits that contain silver. He is a large volume dealer and never uses ebay - he is a bit out of date.

So based on what I knew of the source and what I saw in the scans I believed it was a slam dunk for an obvious cae of an alteration.

You see the coin in the scan is apparently made from an OVERDATE die. The 7 was cut over a 6. It is a VERY SCARCE die variety listed in "Resplandores" and as such should command a large premium over the normal die variety. The seller did not describe it as the overdate.

The reason I didn't believe that Tony was involved in any alteration was because he didn't mention the overdate. Normally, I would have just advised Tony that he had missed a variety and I would have had no further interest, but I saw something else as well that made me interested in the coin. On the obverse (eagle side) of the coin, the eagle's left and right wing tips are WRONG. The feathers at the wing tip are NOT the same as the hub used to make the working dies in 1870. Since all 1870 coins made in Guanajuato were made from full HUBS there is no way that the feathers should look different - coin to coin - unless there was a post strike alteration.

So I was sure they had been added by engraving the coin to make it appear to be a higher grade. I presumed that the overdate feature - the trace of the loop of the 6 to the right of the 7 had also been added and that the toning was done to cover the alteration and to complete the illusion of an AU coin. True Uncirculated 1870 Go coins are very scarce to rare, so an AU is about as good as you can get.

When I got the coin, it was OBVIOUS that the coin was toned artificially. The coin is far from AU more like VF-EF. It has the details of an EF but lacks the mint luster needed to get that grade. It was likely overdipped or harshly cleaned before it was toned. A perfect candidate for a coin doctor.

But then I checked the two features I believed were engraved - the OD and the wing tips. I discovered THESE FEATURES WERE NOT ENGRAVED.

The overdate is absolutely original to the die and the die shares all of the same hairline cracks as known original copies. So that feature was not added. It is the VERY SCARCE reverse die.

But the real surprise was the wing tips. These "engraved" feathers are DIE FEATURES. This particular die was a weakly hubbed die that a mint engraver modified before it was placed into production. The mint worker apparently noticed that the feathers were missing on each wing tip and he used an engraving tool to add them to the die. This makes this one die unique for 1870. I don't know how many other copies exist using this die but other 1870 overdates DO NOT use this particular obverse die. So it represents a subvariety not listed in Resplandores.

I will now be hunting all 1870 Go coins to see if the recut eagle die was mated with a normal date cap die as well.

In this case, the error I made turned out very well. But it was an error. It also points out the complexity of this hobby and the fun that you can have in tracking down new die varieties.