I must admit that this is very troubling discovery. Forgers exercise their business for decades and
became and more smart polishing up the technology.
Do I understand correctly the ideas above?
That is, these dangerous
fakes are produced using the folowing process:
1.
Cast copies of dies are fabricated.
It seems that this can be done rather convincingly but there is a smothing phenomenon, revealing the method.
By the way, should be such copies be from metal or one can use modern materials like plastics or ceramics?
2. The die is
enhanced mechanically to increaase the sharpness, and, possibly, modified by
adding some small extra details, polishing the fields, adding imitations of flaws. It can be also deformed a
bit, treated chemically to imitate wear etc.
From one authentic coin one can obtained a family of quite close but different dies.
The question is whether such enchancing can give the desired result. Is it feasible? It seems that it is,
taking into account that one can ingrave a
portrait on the grain...
3. Now the
flan produced using in a very primitive way corresponding to the method which is believed
to be authentic. The coin is struck,
silvered. Some further treatment is used to tarnish the surface and
imitate traces of wear.
The crucial question: In which
price range this is rentable? Unfortunately, this kind of manufacturing
being
applied by professional teams (say, in Balkans), could be rentable even for low cost coins (> $20), especially, for silver.
There is one step more to
complete the cycle: to deliver the coins to the end users.
One can try do this via existing chains of supply. Could we spot this? It seems that one should be
especially very attentive to a dealer who sell regularly large quantities of
high grade coins mainly
rare.
Of course, my thoughts above are just speculations. I would like to get convincing arguments that
this is impossible (rather to live with an idea that there are a lot
fakes undistinguishable from authentic coins).
To the moment, nobody could explain me why the metal of coins from old
collections differs from coins
of current supply...