As the 10-year gold bull continues its stunning run, rumors of fakery seem to be cropping up as fast as new Eagles can be minted. Should you be worried? Do you need to run to the coin shop for a home test kit?

Well, the counterfeiters are out there, and have been for millennia, but how to counter them?

You probably remember movies about the Old West, wherein a shady-looking character would offer to exchange a gold coin for a horse, and the nag’s owner would bite down on the coin. That was about all you could do, if you lacked proper assaying equipment and had to make a snap judgment on the fly: depend on your teeth to tell you whether the metal in your hand was sufficiently soft to be genuine gold.

The bite test is actually a pretty good one since gold, despite being among the heaviest metals, is also very soft. If you chomp down and shatter a tooth, it ain’t gold. But does that mean you need to munch your way through your coin collection? In a word, no. 

Not that faking coins would be that hard to do. This is the 21st century after all, and if there’s one thing we do well, it’s making copies of things. Given contemporary 3-D laser imaging, a die could be created that mimicked the real deal in perfect detail. It’s not as if you could hold your coin up to the light and see the kinds of safeguards built into paper currency these days.

Predictably enough, counterfeiting concerns eventually hit the Internet. About a year ago, the blogosphere bloomed with doomsday warnings after the publication of a series of articles in Coin World, dealing with the subject of coin counterfeiting in China, where it’s quasi-legal. The Web was abuzz with the worries of coin holders and eBay shoppers, as well as the pontifications of pundits about the coming flood of knockoffs from the far East.

Now that didn’t seem right to us. We’ve been at this a goodly while, and we’ve never heard of anyone being slipped a fake Eagle or Maple Leaf. Just to be on the safe side, though, we checked with a dealer of 30 years’ experience and got the same answer. Nope. Only seen a couple over the past three decades. 

The thing is, it’s really impractical. Any counterfeit bullion coin would have to be gold in order to pass. If it were pure, then what would be the point? And if the counterfeiter skimped on the gold content, the coin’s weight would be a dead giveaway. The only alternative would be to gold-plate a coin made out of some other metal. But again, getting the weight right while preserving the correct size would be a challenge. In the end, there’s just not enough of a profit margin to make it worthwhile.

The exception is rare coins. These can be made with the proper gold content, then artificially aged so that only an experienced numismatist could pick them out. Because of the premium they command, faux rare coins made with real gold could be highly profitable where a bullion coin would not.

This is one of the reasons (impartial grading is the other) why many collectors will only trade coins graded and slabbed by third-party specialists like Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS) or Numismatic Guaranty Corp. (NGC).  

Ominously, though, some counterfeit coins are turning up inside phony slabs, and the graders are taking the threat seriously. Both the major services have warned about this, with NGC providing guidelines about how to spot fakes of their slabs here CONTINUE READING