FUTURE OF U.S. COIN AUTHENTICATION
Identifying Fakes Is an Art and a Science
Coin authentication can be both an art and a science, but the science part is better. When I started working for the American Numismatic Association Certification Service (ANACS) in November of 1978, with the ultimate goal of starting an additional grading service for ANA, I was first trained as an authenticator. After all, there is no point in grading a coin if it is counterfeit, altered, or otherwise not an original numismatic item.
Back then, the process of authentication—the determination of whether or not a numismatic item is both genuine and original—required the ability to look at an item with a good eye for detail and a good memory of what you had seen before. Eventually, I trained several authenticators myself, and I can assure you that some people have a better eye for detail than others. I suspect now that people who like to do jigsaw puzzles make the best authenticators, but that is just a guess.
Of course, some memory aids and records are important. The first generation of ANACS authenticators
(the service opened in 1972) made drawings on index cards showing die characteristics of both genuine coins and counterfeits. A classic example of a genuine coin characteristic would be the diagonal die scratch inside the incused T of LIBERTY on an 1893-S Morgan dollar. Only one obverse die was used to strike the entire press run of this issue, so if an 1893-S dollar does not have this die characteristic, subject to damage or excessive wear in this generally well-protected area, the coin is not genuine.
Other die characteristics can prove a coin to be false. A classic example of this would be the MCMVII (1907)
High Relief $20 Saint-Gaudens coin with a very tiny but deliberate tool mark inside the eagle’s claw that is commonly described as the Greek letter “Ω” or Omega. Some people have speculated that the counterfeiter who made this piece did so because his work was so perfect that he was afraid that he might accidentally buy his own counterfeits back as genuine without this marker that only he knew about. Personally, I think that the counterfeiter was just showing off.
However, I can assure you that the early ANACS authenticator who spotted the “Omega” mark catalogued several other blemishes on the dies as well that repeat from
counterfeit specimen to counterfeit specimen. Even without the “Omega” mark, these counterfeits would have been spotted and condemned because of repeating die marks.
The cataloguing of repeating die marks is one of the main keys to counterfeit detection. Besides marks caused by die imperfections that repeat from coin to coin, virtually every genuine coin struck shows some sort of random contact mark or other striking imperfection that should be unique to that coin. Put enough BU Morgan dollars side by side and you might find one such mark which, by coincidence, appears to be the same on two different coins.
However, the dozens of other random marks on the two genuine coins will all be different. Make a counterfeit die from one of the genuine coins, and the random pattern of contact marks will be repeated on every counterfeit struck from that die.
The state of the art of authentication improved at ANACS when Ed Fleischmann joined the staff in the fall of 1976. Prior to that, he was my boss in Coin World’s “Collectors Clearinghouse” page, where, among many other things, we studied die varieties and error coins. People who study die varieties also make good authenticators, and that is not a guess! We also fielded questions that bordered on authentication, though we did not issue certificates as such.
Ed loved photography as well as coins, and he took thousands of closeup shots on his 35mm camera using an attachment that connected it directly to a microscope. Prints from these shots and often their negatives were stored in large envelopes that were filed by denomination and then by date and mintmark for future reference.
Some of these “photomicrographs” were used to illustrate a monthly column in ANA’s monthly journal,
The Numismatist, in an attempt to share our knowledge with the hobby. For example, a very popular column illustrated all of the mintmark positions known on genuine 1916-D Mercury dimes, an issue for which many added mintmark coins exist. I recently saw it reproduced in an online forum. Another did the same for
1909-S V.D.B. Lincoln cents. Eventually, many such columns were reprinted in two reference books that both collectors and dealers bought to compare to coins they were thinking of buying.
The accumulation and dissemination of such knowledge helped the cause of fighting counterfeits, but for a long time its exposure was limited to ANA members who got the magazines and cut out our columns or the people who bought the reprint books. Nowadays, the ANA has made some back issues available online to the general public and others available only to members, but the lack of a comprehensive index of the ANACS columns printed can make the information difficult to access.
Now, fortunately, there are new groups doing heroic work at fighting against the plague of counterfeiting, and we can thank the much-maligned internet for their success. One of the leaders in the fight is Jack Young, an engineer by trade and a specialist in Early American Coppers. He has published many articles on counterfeit coins in the Early American Coppers Club’s Penny-Wise, the
Liberty Seated Collectors Club’s The Gobrecht Journal, the Colonial Coin Collectors Club’s newsletter, ANA’s
The Numismatist, and numerous online articles at CoinWeek.com.
With an engineer’s attention to detail, Young has developed a process specifically for authenticating large cents and half cents, also known as early coppers, which are famous for their wealth of die varieties. This was especially true in the first two decades of the existence of these coins, but Young has since expanded the process to all coins.
Now, if you find all of this to be intimidating, you can always rely upon the slabbing services to do your homework for you. Just make sure you don’t buy
a counterfeit or altered coin in a counterfeit slab, or a genuine but switched coin in an altered slab.
I saw what may have been the first known counterfeit slab in December of 2007 when a customer brought a very high-grade 1795 Draped Bust dollar into the coin shop I was working in at the time, which he had just bought from a source in China (a giant red flag). It seemed to match the die characteristics seen in the well-illustrated Silver Dollars and Trade Dollars of the United States, by Q. David Bowers (steps 1 and 3 in
Young’s process), but based upon my experience with Bust dollars, there was something about the appearance of the coin that disturbed me (step 6 in Young’s process). Alas, that kind of experience can only be lived, not taught.
Lacking proof that the coin was counterfeit, I suggested to the collector that he return the coin for a refund, but instead he went home and ordered two more Draped Bust dollars from the same source. He could afford it, and he was curious. When he brought the three coins in together, I immediately knew that all three coins were counterfeit.
For one thing, the three obverses were identical except for the dates, 1795, 1796 and 1797. The 1795 obverse had been directly copied from a genuine 1795 coin, so it looked alright. On the 1796 coin, the 6 in the date was the exact 9 from the 1795 coin cloned and turned upside down. On the 1797 coin, the second 7 was just the first 7 cloned and duplicated. All other letter and star positions were identical to the 1795 coin, as well as the denticles at the rim. I don’t know what hardware and software techniques they are using to make these counterfeit dies, but they are damned scary.
The reverses were all struck from the same die, which actually is not in and of itself a cause for alarm. Within this particular series, there are reverse dies that were used multiple times over multiple years. The key thing was that all three reverses showed the exact same die state, whereas the original genuine reverses used over multiple years show natural die wear from repeated strikings.
Know your series (step 3 from Young’s process).
More importantly, all three coins showed repeating die marks that are not on the original reverse die. They were caused by minor imperfections present on the host coin (the genuine coin that was copied) that the counterfeiter’s excellent die making process faithfully reproduced. The trick to spotting them is to have two different coins from the same die or excellent photographs of other counterfeits (step 4 from Young’s process).
With the collector’s permission, I called the TPG in question and arranged for the three fake slabs to be sent to the TPG for study. Since that time, the major TPG’s have spent much time and money upgrading the security of their slabs over and over and over again. One of them is now even offering an NFC (Near-Field Communica
tion) chip embedded in the slab that can be read by your smartphone. Be sure to check with your favorite TPG’s website now and then for the latest in slab security features.
Jack Young is also a pioneer in a new field of counterfeit detection: finding coins that have been copied from genuine but damaged coins that have been mechanically repaired before they were copied onto counterfeit dies. The advantage to the counterfeiters of this technique is that it gives them a much wider population of coins to copy and at a much reduced price.
That 1795 dollar mentioned above was copied from a genuine host coin in very high grade that presumably cost the counterfeiter thousands of dollars. When he presumably sold it after the counterfeits were copied from it, he ran the risk of exposure, because the repeating marks seen on the counterfeits were present on his host coin as well.
While I was at ANACS, I erroneously certified as genuine a low-grade 1796 quarter dollar with what looked like a scratch in the right obverse field. When a dealer friend handed me the certified coin and a duplicate of it at a convention a year or two later, I said “Oops!” and published the counterfeit in The Numismatist. This led to two or three more counterfeits being sent in for study, as well as the genuine host coin. I tried to track the host coin back to the counterfeiter but, alas, one dealer in the chain of custody had purchased it at a coin show for cash.
Using the internet and the amazing photo recognition software available nowadays (step 4 from Young’s process), Young and his cohorts have tracked numerous counterfeit coins back to their original damaged or undamaged host coins. This is the future of counterfeit coin detection: finding relevant pictures online.
After I knew that that 1796 quarter was counterfeit, I spent a few hours in the fabulous ANA library not 100 feet from my desk. Flipping through the recent auction catalogues of several major auction houses, I found that each of the major houses had sold at least one of the 1796 counterfeits in the preceding five years. They were valuable enough to get a decent lot description and picture but in a low enough grade (with an apparent problem, no less, which was actually a lamination on the host coin) to avoid too much scrutiny.
I learned a valuable lesson that day: Never assume that something is too cheap or in too low a condition to be counterfeited. In some parts of the world, a counterfeit that costs $1 to make and sells for $10 is considered a great success.
To sum up Young’s system: Use the internet to compare a suspicious coin with other genuine coins and with other counterfeit coins. Attribute it, and see if it exists with that date style and that mintmark style and that design styling. Some modern counterfeits are laughable trash, such as a 1798-CC Trade Dollar I have seen, while other counterfeits are very subtle and can only be exposed because they use a date and mintmark style not known to have been used together.
Learn what is out there, and think.