The following announcement/alert was posted to the PCGS Website :

In recent days, counterfeit coins in counterfeit PCGS slabs have begun to appear on eBay, the online auction site. All of the counterfeit coins/holders seen so far are coming out of China. Alert members of the PCGS Message Boards were the first to notify PCGS of the counterfeit coins/holders.

The coins themselves range from poor-quality counterfeits to well-made fakes. The counterfeit PCGS holders are well-executed, but with minor differences from a genuine holder. PCGS anticipates that authentic coins will eventually be placed into counterfeit PCGS holders in the future, perhaps with elevated grades and/or inappropriate designators (Full Bell Lines, Prooflike, etc.), although none have been seen to date.

The on-line PCGS Certificate Verification is a method for confirming that a particular certificate number matches the information in the PCGS database, but the counterfeiters are aware of this detection method and are now using valid certificate numbers (see below).

PCGS has contacted U.S. governmental agencies, including the FBI, U.S. Customs, the Secret Service, and US Postal authorities, to enlist their assistance in pursuing enforcement or legal remedies against these counterfeiters. Also, PCGS is a member of eBay’s CCW Group, which monitors eBay for fraudulent listings and asks eBay to discontinue auctions of suspicious coins and/or suspend violators.

PCGS has called for eBay to stop accepting listings of any rare coins from Chinese sellers. Ebay recently pulled several auctions of counterfeit coins/holders at the urging of PCGS. (more…)

By Gary Eggleston – BellaOnline’s Coin Collecting Editor

Many people enjoy shopping online where there are great buys of coins that can be found. A person may prefer do his shopping while he is at home because it is convenient and time-saving instead of going out looking for stores that sell collectible coins and other souvenirs.

A person can differentiate between a live auction and an Internet because an online auction can take several days to complete. They entertain bids for the highest price up until the time the auction is about to close.. Many people that are bidding online enjoy the experience and they may be familiar with the strategies to use to win an online auction.

There are also online sites where a person can buy any item that may capture his interest. This is where most coin collectors purchase their desired coins. By searching and finding the item that they want, they can actually negotiate and make the payments through the Internet. This can be very risky as you are dealer/seller that is unknown to the buyer, yet many people are still making transactions and payments through this kind of online auction. Read Full Story

Although counterfeiting techniques keep improving, mintmarks are still added to coins using the same two methods. Skip Fazzari describes how to spot these fakes.

When many things get old, they are discarded and new things, perhaps better made, take their place. Not so with old counterfeit and altered coins. Although some fakes are taken off the market each year and are either put into reference collections or destroyed, others remain to plague another generation and are passed on to one unsuspecting collector after another.

Most will agree that coin alterations consist of the addition or removal of parts of a coin’s design. Interestingly, although techniques of fakery have improved over the years, a majority of the coins with added mintmarks are still made by two methods. For the most common type of alteration, a numeral or letter is applied directly to the surface of the host coin. The micrograph taken at 20x shows an example of a coin altered in this way. In this case, a “D” mintmark has been placed on the reverse of a genuine 1916 Mercury dime to produce a coveted 1916-D coin. Read Full Article