Please take some time and visit the site below for some awesome photos of counterfeit coins being made in China. These are very high grade coins and many are being put into Counterfeit NGC & PCGS Slabs.
I wonder how many of these counterfeit coins will find their way into the United States from Olympic tourist. Some have been spotted on eBay. Be careful, be very careful. daffy
Interesting photos. I'd seen some of those before from a link at the CoinTalk forum but had never seen the complete series. I'm a collector but generally only collect lower value stuff. I don't pay hundreds of dollars for coins (much less thousands) so even if I did buy a fake coin for my collection it wouldn't be a big deal. If I was convinced it was real it would still have value to me.
I think the coin dealers and folks that have serious money tied up in their collections should begin to worry. These types of counterfeits, especially the slabbed ones, will only get better. If this activity begins to get front page news coverage, even the mass of idiots that buy overgraded and overpriced coins on ebay may become wary of coin collecting.
There's been alot of online chat about what the TPG comanies can do to foil the makers of counterfeit slabbed coins. Let's just say for argument's sake that they succeed. They perfect a foolproof system to slab a coin and guarantee that it is original and properly graded and attributed. How much value are the coins in the "obsolete" slabs going to lose. Sure you could send them in for re-slabbing, but I can't see the TPG's doing that at no charge. You would have to pay again for something you'd already paid for once. This scenario would impact dealers more so than collectors. If you're $100,000 inventory is all slabbed and suddenly everyone wants to buy coins in new and improved slab, you are going to take a financial hit one way or another.
To sum up, I don't think counterfeiting is a huge threat to the hobby of coin collecting. Many of the counterfeits will happily find a home in a collection and live out their days loved and adored. A thousand years from now they'll be tagged as contemporary forgeries and may even be rarer and more valuable than the real thing. The threat is to the coin dealers. The ones smart enough to detect the fakes and avoid them, will do well. The intentional scammers who buy counterfeits and resell them as genuine, will do well. The rest of the coin dealers may change occupations, one way or another.
Just one man's opinion. Sorry for the ramble. It is sloooow at work today. _________________ Andy
I've also been watching this develop and am not sure what the ultimate effects will be. I never gave much thought to Chinese counterfeiting before baby formula was found to be toxic, which bothers my sense of humanity. When I strolled through the knock-off market in Beijing it didn't bother me to see designer clothes, luggage, cel phones, etc. But fake coins and slabs bothers me from the standpoint of how counterfeiting falsifies history. I inlcude the long line of fake ancients in that because those coins yield proportionately large influences on our understanding of ancient cultures. Fakes cheapen this, heightening ambiguity.
At worst, fake slabs will drive people away from the hobby, put dealers out of business, and make real slabs really expensive due to all the necessary protective measures.
At best it will force the average hobbyist to dedicate more time to scrutinizing potential purchases carefully, and to educate themselves about the problem. This way the marketplace will become harder for the fakes to penetrate. And eBay will be the wild card, since one cannot really scrutinize anything from a tiny image. But eBay is a lousy place to buy high-end stuff anyway, for many reasons.
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daffy
