COUNTERFEIT 1787 MASSACHUSETTS “4C” HALF CENT

A comment I have heard in regards to these latest struck fakes is that the counterfeiters do not copy low grade or common coins; the subject of this latest article begs to differ and I titled my initial C4 (Colonial Coin Collectors Club) News Letter article “A Story of a Curious “4-C Massachusetts 1/2 Cent”. This is intended as an installment disclosing discovered current deceptive struck counterfeits and establishing attribution guides for each; this article was revised from a previously posted version in Coin Week. The research continues to be a collaborative effort with many participating numismatic club, Face Book “Dark Side” members and friends participating.

Note: "Dark Side" is our counterfeit-focused Facebook page, spun out of Early American Copper’s Copper Notes to include non-members of EAC with an interest in participating in a forum on this subject.

After seeing this “coin” listed for auction on the internet by one of the apparently connected sellers I monitor I immediately turned my “suspicious eye” on it; starting with the third-party grading (TPG) certification I became even more suspicious of this one, as the on-line cert verification stated “Grade: CONTACT CUSTOMER SERVICE”. I pulled the pics from the listing and emailed them to several C4/EAC folks I know for their opinions, as this was my first look at a Massachusetts copper. The results drove more questions, as the pics weren’t great and the “coin” wasn’t in-hand but everyone who reviewed it stated concerns about its possible authenticity; another consideration was the possibility it was an unknown die state/ variety, so how cool would that be?

Biting the bullet, I decided to “win” the auction (for an undisclosed embarrassing price) and turn this research article into another personal learning experience thanks to the help of several “copper friends”.

One of the initial steps I take in investigating an interesting “coin” is to compare it to images of a known genuine example. There are many outstanding coin related web sites to use as resources to this end (auction houses, TPG sites, etc.). In this case I found a similar example of the same variety on Heritage’s web site and created the comparison images as follows:

The red circles highlight areas of differences between these two examples. From this review it became more apparent how to search for other ones, concentrating on the differences to a known one AND the apparent damage noted at the lower eagle/ date area of the suspect one.

Since last fall we have found two more examples of this one; the 1st in December 2016 was encapsulated by one of the TPG’s, the 2nd example was listed on the internet in June 2017 and was raw. That makes the current count seven documented examples with no way to know how many more are actually “out there”!

Continued research and internet searches did produce additional examples with identical “circulation/ damage marks” (known to our group as “sister marks”) as well as the differences noted from a known genuine example. It is appropriate to note we have seen other examples of documented struck counterfeit early coppers with a die break like the one from the foot to the bow always seen on this variety tooled away in the fakes (ref our article on the 1798 “S-158’s”)

For more information on the Colonial Coin Collectors Club, see:
http://colonialcoins.org/

For more infornation on Early American Coppers club, see:
http://eacs.org/

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