I was at a coin show today and pointed out to a seller that his Mark Antony legionary denarius was a forgery ─ I'm 99% sure of it. Fortunately he removed it from his display and put it in his pocket. Three things: the surface looked plated, the rim was raised, and the edged looked like it had a seam.
Has anyone else seen forgeries at a coin show? It was a first for me!
Not a coin show per se, but my grandfather was a accomplished numismatist, and met a lady who had survived world war II and had 2 Lodz Ghetto tokens. He sent them in to a TPG for grading, and somehow they came back as fakes.
It transpired that all the Lodz tokens they'd previously graded of this type were not genuine, so basically they had been scamming the market for however long.
Oggy, are you saying the TPG was repeatedly grading fake tokens as genuine and graded your grandfather's as fake because their "model" was itself a fake? The 20 mark is legitimately rare, but the 10 mark does not seem to be so scarce to immediately draw assumptions of being fake.
I have two of the 10 mark tokens. I have no certainty as to whether they are authentic or not. They meet the diameter, weight, and thickness specifications exactly (one thick variant and one thin), which I guess doesn't preclude them being fake, but if they are fake then some work went into getting the metal content exactly right. Are there tell-tale signs of counterfeits?
