Help With 1943 USA One Cent Copper Magnetic!

Please have a little bit of patience. It is 3:31AM here in the States. Most US members are asleep for the night.

Your cent is not copper; it is steel. In 1943, copper was being used for the war effort, so our cents were produced in steel and coated in zinc that year. The zinc coating was applied prior to striking so the seal was not very good which is why most of these cents rust and corrode. Unfortunately, these coins only have value if they are brilliant uncirculated with no corrosion. Even then, they are not terribly valuable.

to the forum eyeball. Be aware of "reprocessed" 1943 cents that also have little value.

Yes you simply found one of the many of those that still pop up once in while. Those are sold at coin shows, flea markets, coin stores all the time and in anywhere from lousy condition to Uncirculated. In the past people used to have fun with them by plating them with almost anything. Many are replated with Zinc to make them look new but even new ones are not the valuable.
Some too are plated with Copper to make people think they are worth a lot of money. Also, as novelties some are Chromed, Tinned and/or made into something for kids. The Copper plated ones are fun to fool friends with that know about them.

Based on the pictures, it looks like a normal low grade steel cent with no signs of copper plating.

maybe all the crud on the coin is making it heavy (this is a joke) I see no trace of any copper on this coin and am pretty sure the weight is wrong that was given. The op really answered their own question when they said it was copper but highly attractive to a magnet, that would rule out it being copper at all and would only leave that it is a regular steel cent because those were the only One Cent coins made by the US that were magnetic. If it were mine, I would just throe it back in the box because its really not worth but face value (at least to me) in this condition as there are plenty of them to go around for anyone that wants one. The only plus thing I can see about the coin is it looks original and not cleaned nor reprocessed (as far as I can tell from the pictures) but still doesn't add any value to this type of coin in this condition


Edit: I see you are in Australia so now I can understand the enthusiasm you have shown when you found this coin. You probably have never seen one nor knew what it was and only that it looked different than any other Lincoln Cent you had ever seen before and that it was different from others in that it was attracted to a magnet also. In this case it is just a normal 1943 Lincoln Cent though because this year they wasn;t supposed to mint any in copper (even though a few were minted (I think like 5 or 6 known so far) because of the war going on at the time and the copper was needed for the bullets needed during the war