It has been said that they come from Italy and noted how close they are in style to aitnacoins' Ebay offers. I haven't studied them closely enough to be sure, because to be honest, it would be a very unpleasant task to do so.
Unfortunately, even though some of the other big firms note tooling whenever they notice it, the fact that these tooled coins are sold at all, sometimes in large numbers, may make them more acceptable to collectors and thus lead to more tooled coins. I don't know what kind of collector these people are that see a tooled coin, no incredible rarity that would not be available untooled, and bid anyway, often hundreds or thousands of dollars.
There was also a huge number of
tooled coins at a recent high-end
Italian auction. I'm just amazed they passed ordinary inspection.
You are probably aware that I made a "big deal" about the huge number of
tooled and badly altered coins used as illustrations in Rainer Albert's book on
Republican coins (the most recent edition), and I also posted on
German lists about that book. Some of the replies I received suggested that no one cares - readers who said they were happy to have a
German language book even with some mistakes. Well, from recollection, about 75 of the illustrated coins were either
forgeries or
tooled. I think that made the book useless. A
collection full of
tooled coins is equally useless, because you no longer know which coins to trust.
The moral for the ordinary collector is: do NOT buy
tooled coins. It completely destroys the credibility, interest of, and saleability of your
collection, because for every 1
tooled coin someone sees, they will presume there are another 10
tooled coins hidden where they cannot detect the tooling.