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The economics of fakes

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basemetal:
Please forgive my ignorance as I'm a newbie.  Can someone explain the economics of fakery. 
Granted, a gold ancient roman coin is worth faking, especially if you can do it in variance and volume.  Same to a certain extent for silver, and for other extremely rare coins (Flavian Amphitheatre coins come to mind).
But to produce a product, even fake, is a sort of busness.  You have overhead. That includes, production, advertisment, distribution, even legal protection.   Is it really profitable to produce a fake ..mmm...Honorius considering the amount of effort involved? Or a really fine Valens fake? Considering what you can buy a real, and in very fine condition Valens for, where is the profit? If it's volume, then every third Valens would be fake or suspicious since there are so many real Valens for sale. And from what I've read of this forum fakes are easy to spot. There must be money in it and I may just be too new to the thing to see how.

slokind:
I think the answers to your questions may be quite variable.  The dreadful and inept fake LRBC with which some bulk lots were salted may have been made practically in someone's barnyard, in the exurbs of a city, or in a small town or village by persons who were otherwise underemployed.  Then there have been fakes that can only be described as an addictive hobby (say, the inverse to our own) for persons of better than middle income and more than average knowledge of coinage.  And lots in between.  Some of these are utterly unprofitable, as addictive hobbies usually are, and others may be marginally profitable.  The higher-tech efforts, though, may be quite profitable; I wonder how many new collectors in places where collecting ancient Mediterranean coins previously was not much done are unwary customers for the things Prokopov has documented.  And some that are called Fakes are really just tourist souvenirs for sale where dealing in real coins is forbidden and the law is enforced.  It isn't, I think, just one question.  Pat L.

Numerianus:
Basemetal has the reason: making forgery of low-cost ancient coins
is not a lucrative business (It was my point in the discussion about monneron's coins).
I am not so sure though about his example with Valens (to my estimate, this is already in
the price range where forgers may have an interest).
Faking of uncleaned should be considered apart: it is cheeting rather than forgering.
However, we observe quite a lot of of 'good' fakes on the market and even in the lower price
end. The problems is that many of them are made officially: for jewellery, as fillers
for collectors, museum copies, etc. Some fakes of this kind are even honestly marked as
copies (but the mark can be removed). With a mass production such an activity is rentable.
Many of such fakes, claimed to be genuine, arrived, finally, to the ebay auctions. Luckily,
it seems that selling them in a regular way it is not a profitable business: sellers are
spotted and they cannot sell fakes for high prices. I have no comments whether the faking of
ancient coins is a popular addictive hobby.   

David Atherton:
I have often wondered this myself. I never really could figure out what the profit margin would be for producing low end fakes. Even faking ancient coins in general and making a profit I think would be more often be a crap shoot than anything else. Unless these coins are produced for next to nothing, I can see no way to gain from it.

If your gonna fake coins...why note fake modern coins? The market for them is so much larger than the tiny niche ancients inhabits.

Rupert:
Excuse me, which Valens are we talking about? The Aur. Valens whom Licinius made Augustus before a battle just to execute him afterwards would surely be an object for forgers, since his coins are extremely rare and you could rather easily tool a Licinius into a Valens. The usual Valens, Augustus 364 to 378 AD, small bronzes are not worth faking since they're too little sought after and their value is to low.

Rupert

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