By Jack D. Young
I have written a number of articles on fake Morgan Dollars in fake PCGS holders but now the latest from China (CN) are counterfeit large cents in fake NGC holders!
I was alerted to three bad listings in a coin forum I frequent, with one already showing sold. All listed on the Bay, all had the standard eBay answer they were A-OK, but they are not OK.
In all listings the seller cut-off the cert number on the label of the fakes, but the genius left enough of the barcode to scan. And unlike the PCGS Morgan fake slabs, the barcodes do scan properly!
So, starting with the “1840,” I show the Bay listing, the cert for the genuine one, and a comparison of the CN counterfeit to the genuine example.
One note I would like to make, when NGC receives information that a cert of theirs has been compromised with a counterfeit, they “nuke” the cert with a note “possible counterfeit holder” which can help someone considering a purchase if they just take the time to look it up. The certs for these three have all been reported and nuked and these are the images I will use in this discussion.
Recent eBay listing of a counterfeit 1840 large cent
The following shows the updated NGC cert and the comparison of the slabbed image of the listed counterfeit and the genuine example.
Next, the “1844”; same seller shipping from China:
Recent eBay listing of a counterfeit 1844 large cent
1844 comparison image of counterfeit, left; genuine example, right
And “last,” the “1846.” This is the initial example shown sold from the coin forum discussion.
Recent eBay listing of a counterfeit 1846 large cent
And the updated cert and comparison to the genuine example; WOW, MS61???
All three showed sold, and all appear to have been removed from the Bay after the fact. The 1840 actually showed as:
Kudos to NGC for so quickly addressing the issue! As far as the coins themselves, the1844 and 1846 are from the “smashed dentils” obverse family, the 1840 “crescent chip obverse” family from my previous Coin Week article, “It’s a Jungle out There! Later Date Large Cent Counterfeits.”
But as usual for these articles there is a twist! Reviewing the seller for any new items revealed another one, this a bad 1855 in bad NGC slab…
Counterfeit ”1855” on the left, genuine example on the right
And another comparison shows these are not even close!
And one common good “tell” for these holders is the size of the prongs!
Going back to check on the seller resulted in this, “No longer registered user”:
“NRU’ed”, I went back to the sold items and although you can see them, they have ALL been removed when you actually click on the links. eBay apparently put the hurt on this seller after the fact. This “1857” would have been interesting to see as it stated PCGS!
Apparent sold and removed later large cent counterfeit from the same seller
What another strange “twist”! I have been a very loud critic of eBay over the last several months about their apparent lack of caring about the number of counterfeits currently allowed for sale there. AND the inability of having obvious bad counterfeits removed through their “new and improved” reporting process. This lead to my latest Live Coin Q&A podcast premiered May 27 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57HwefhVn_k
It seems rather ironic after previously receiving responses like the following one on these fakes that the day after the podcast all of these including the active listings and the seller were removed!
eBay response to my report of the bad 1844 not NGC large cent
So ends another episode of my Facebook group, Fun with Fakes (FwF’s) and Proxiblog; it continues to be really hard to keep up with all the ways the counterfeiters are challenging the Hobby but we will continue to release content like this in an effort to help!