help..... i purchased this brittish trade dollar year 1900,from an ebay dealer. when the coin arived i weighed it,and it was 5.4108 grams light.coin should weigh 26.9568, but it weigh's 21.5460. the coin has only slight wear. i am almost certain this coin is a counterfeit.
I'm sure you already checked the accuracy of your scale, I mean it's providing readouts of 1/10000 of a gram. Holy Moses, what type of scale is it? B
yes scale is dialed in,i check it with certified weights. the coin is kind of interesting,it is the first fake i have discovered. the coin only cost about 18.50 total so i am not out a great amount. does it have any value as a counterfeit coin? i am thinking of keeping it for my collection,labeled as counterfiet .
The weight sounds typical for the electrotype copies from China, which can be found offered on EBay about 8 days a week. If so, you've paid top dollar value for it. I personally have never paid more than $10-15 including S/H to knowingly purchase any of the counterfeits in my collection of 19th & early 20th Century silver crowns that circulated in Asia.
Roy is right.. There are a lot of counterfeit crown size silver coins coming from China, Malasia and Indonasia. They are made of Nepalese Silver or Chinese silver.. I found a lots of British Trade Dollars, French Chinese and several such coins here in India and all of them are fake...
Biju,the most commonly faked British Trade Dollar is the 1935.There are around 15 genuine examples known. A clue in telling the fake ones is the appearance of the surface of the piece.It has a very soapy appearance in addition to the fact that it has a grey colour,as opposed to the whitish colour of silver. My boss used to go to Singapore & Hong Kong a lot.He always was buying British Trade Dollars that have been cleaned.Not once did he get landed with a dud one,which is very surprising. Aidan.
By the by Aidan, my first posting in this forum was to know whether some of the coins I got were genuine or not... and to my horror, I found that all of them were fake... And you are right... you can identify the fakes by its soapy surface and colour..
now here is the kicker. the ebay seller accused me of a coin swap. on a coin i won for 14.99 i have bought many coins costing a whole lot more,but this is the first time i was taken. my biggest mistake was buying from a hobby seller,instead of my regular full time coin dealers.
aidan, you are right on about the soapy look of the coin. i checked the appearance side by side with a couple genuine crowns.
faked silver dollars recently the wholesale price of faked silver dollars were up 50% due to price increased of major metals around the world. i bought 200 pcs of them. it looks great. i keep it to replace plastic chips for playing card game and others. note: the intrinsic value of those faked dollar is now worth $0.212 each. that's not include fabrication fee and other cost. and it was estimated to be hundred of thousands make. new york city marketplace sold those between $2.00 to $5.00 each. if you know the insider. it will cost you much less.
