The Mystery of the Coin That Shouldn't Exist
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A few interesting (perhaps) tidbits of nerdery:
1:
> "But when Dr. Ortega and Ms. Bravo Hualpa bombarded the 1899 coin with X-rays and measured the light it re-emitted, they determined that the dinero was largely made of copper, zinc and nickel.
This sounds extremely fancy (and technically it is), but what you may find surprising is that the technique they used (XRF eg X-Ray Fluorescence analysis) is so useful in the coin/bullion industry that you can buy handheld "XRF guns" that perform a metal composition analysis on the spot and present the readout in a very easy-to-consume way on a small LCD screen. And you can buy them on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/XRF/s?k=XRF
(They are not cheap.) But they are ridiculously useful and it feels like a magic trick to point it at a piece of metal and have an instant elemental readout. As you might guess, 99% of this is to check whether a piece of gold/silver is actually gold/silver.
2:
Unlike TFA's example, among US coins there are lots of counterfeits out there that ARE made out of the proper base metal (typically 90% gold, as much US gold coinage is composed).
Why on earth would someone do that? The answer is that in the mid-20th century, many countries (including the US) imposed restrictions on import and export of gold but had exclusions for certain types of currency. So one clever way to transport quantities of foreign gold into the United States was to make sure you were transporting exempted US currency. So many countries developed sophisticated counterfeiting techniques to turn non-US-coinage gold into US-coinage gold. This worked quite well for getting gold into the US but has been a thorn in the side of collectors here for a while, since you might buy a rare US gold coin that's actually truly made of gold and yet is still a counterfeit :(
Oh wow that's really neat, feels like something out of Star Trek (Tricorder).
> (They are not cheap.)
Ok, but what is "not cheap"? A hundred? A couple hundred? Might be a cool thing to have
Clicks link
Oh dear god, $20K-40K. Yep, I think I'll pass but super cool nonetheless. Thank you for introducing me to that technology!
That's fascinating! What a funny situation.
Is there actually any way to detect a counterfeit coin that is made of the right materials? It seems like all you've got to go on is the physical shape and relief. But that seems far easier to match perfectly than paper bills.
Is there at least any way to tell "old" counterfeits from modern ones?
Coin nerds study the real ones in excruciating detail - to the point that people catalog not only the various dies that were used to strike various coins but the states of those dies (i.e. Early die state == pristine coins. Middle die state == a crack or chip might have started to form which presents as a raised line or spot on the surface of struck coins. Late die state == chunks of the die might be missing.). This is often done through reverse engineering -- examining enough examples of struck coins to identify differences in the the dies used. The dies themselves can be identified through unique markers -- a polish line here, the exact positioning of a letter, a microscopic defect, etc.
So when you are able to identify the known dies, a counterfeit will stick out like a sore thumb. And if it was made from a cast copy of a known-good coin, then those will have their own telltale giveaways.
In short: The counterfeits will always have subtle differences.
I think something not entirely dissimilar is still true in some cases: there are limits, in various countries around the world, as to how much you can cross the border with without warning the customs but for some coins it's the face value, not the actual value, that counts. So for example someone can take shitloads of $50 gold coins that are actually worth $2000 (instead of $50) and legally cross the border with 40x the actual limit without having to warn the customs.
I may be mistaken though.
Failing that there's still the old Eureka! standby of weight + water volume displacement.
https://www.horiba.com/int/scientific/technologies/energy-di...
Maybe they thought it'd be suspicious to show up to a bank with rolls of never used 1896 dimes? Then you'd think the banks would notice the problem immediately, but they might have been too desperate for coins to care.
Or they did notice, and the counterfeiters changed the year shortly after.
The counterfeiting was probably done in the US or Europe. The nickel silver process was not known in Peru at the time and Peru is a small country so it is doubtful someone could start minting coins using new equipment and a novel process without the information getting out.
But somewhere faraway in the US or Europe somebody could use an existing mill to mint some obscure foreign coins without even the workers suspecting it is illegal. The counterfeiter can say he has a contract to make the coins from the Peruvian government and I doubt anyone would have raised an eyebrow. Thus, the counterfeiter probably did not have good information about the Peruvian mint's plans to mint that particular coin that particular year.
As far as the banks, no counterfeiter shows up at a bank with a roll of their fake currency. Bankers are trained to recognize fakes. The counterfeiter would try to place it in the stream of trade, so that by the time they reach a bank the fake coins are mixed with real coins and are submitted by a trusted customer.
The counterfeiter would probably go to a port town find some poor and suspicious looking merchants and use the fake coins to buy some peruvian goods at somewhat generous prices.
I don't have the history of why all these bills suddenly appeared in the market or why they were never circulated. Wikipedia notes that the Costa Rican president was overthrown in Jan of that year.
The article itself is short and interesting, so worth reading, but the title is a bit misleading
The suggestion that this counterfeit was produced abroad since "nickel silver wasn't widely used for [official] coins in Peru" seems to be an entirely illogical conclusion! We already know it's a counterfeit, so practices of the official mint are irrelevant. Default assumption, absent any other evidence, would be that it was produced domestically as most counterfeits are.
Slow news day at the NY Times I suppose, although better way to fill the pages than speculating about Taylor Swift's sexuality.
the title is "The Mystery of the Coin That Shouldn't Exist" given that it is counterfeit I would say its fair to say it is a "coin that should not exist"