THE SHOW DOWN IS COMING

By Laura Sperber on December 2, 2011 6:49 AM

By Vic Bozarth – Bozarth Numismatics

The ‘COIN DOCTORING’ controversy is indeed the HOT topic currently.  My name is Vic Bozarth and I am proud to be a PNG-Professional Numismatist Guild member.  My wife Sherri and I both attended the PNG meeting prior to the opening of the Florida United Numismatists Show.  Talking about grading is like talking about politics.  Everyone has an opinion especially when ‘COIN DOCTORING’ is mentioned.

First, I will give you my opinion about ‘working’ on coins.  Second, I will explain my opinion.

Original surfaces are KING! No questions asked!  Indeed CAC should be applauded for their focus on originality.  If at all possible a coin should be left in the original condition as it was found.  That being said SOME coins NEED to have ‘work’ done on them.  Some coins were worked on prior to your ownership.  Some coins were stored improperly.  No better example can be given than the damage that PVC can do to a coin.  I regularly remove PVC from coins that have come to me in flips-raw and ungraded.  I have dipped coins using jewel luster and I have used diluted household ammonia to remove dirt from the surface of a coin.

If a coin has something on the surface of the metal that could possibly damage the coin in the future, I will try to remove it.  BUT, and here is the RUB, I have never moved, removed, or added metal, nor have I knowingly abrased or added any substance to the surface of a coin.  Am I a coin doctor?  Unfortunately, to some ANY ‘work’ on a coin is doctoring.  The RUB so to speak, is the DEFINITION!

So what is ‘Coin Doctoring’?  The problem is in the definition.  Grading and the detection of coin doctoring are always evolving.  Grading standards have changed and coins that the grading services would once ‘slab’ are now sent back ‘no grade’.  Overall, tight grading standards are good for everyone.  The product integrity is everything.  Both PCGS and NGC have spent a lot of money both promoting their ‘product’ and being vigilant in trying to prevent ‘coin doctoring’.  Overall, I think they have done a good job of confronting the issue, but ….what is the definition of ‘Coin Doctoring’?

The DEFINITION of the problem is the PROBLEM. After countless hours of trying to come up with a definition that the PNG board could take to the membership for approval, all that was concluded was that PNG cannot define ‘Coin Doctoring’ for the grading services.  Indeed, aren’t the grading services responsible for setting the standards that coins in their holders are supposed to meet?

There are many reasons for this controversy, but the primary issue is the DEFINITION of coin doctoring.  The PNG Code of Ethics addresses the ‘Doctoring’ issue in point seven of their seventeen membership standards.  I have reprinted the pertinent point below:

PNG Code of Ethics, Number Seven:  To refrain from knowingly dealing in counterfeit, altered, repaired or “doctored” numismatic items without fully disclosing their status to my customers.  Coin doctoring is the action of a person, or the enabling of another, to alter a coin’s surface or appearance, usually to diminish or conceal defects, and thereby represent the condition or value of a coin as being superior to its actual condition or value.  Among the practices defined as doctoring are effacing hairlines by polishing or manipulating the surfaces of proof coins, appleing substances to the surface of coins to hide marks and defects, hiding marks or otherwise changing the appearance of a coin by adding toning, adding chemicals or otherwise manipulating the surfaces to create “cameo” frost on the devices of proof coins, and making a coin appear more fully struck by re-engraving portions of the devices, such as re-engraving bands on the reverse of a Mercury Dime or adding head of other struck portions of a coin to make it appear to be from a mint date or type other than that of origin, and altering business strike coins to make them resemble proof issues are also examples of coin doctoring.  This definition is not intended to be all-inclusive, but only illustrative of forms of coin doctoring.

The majority of PNG members understand the problem.  Having the PNG define ‘Coin Doctoring’ for the hobby is like the ‘tail wagging the dog’.  The PNG already has addressed the ‘coin doctoring’ issue in their Code of Ethics and I would suggest that the majority understood that voting for a CHANGE that was NOT PROPERLY DEFINED wasn’t making progress.  In fact, a proposed change in bylaws would put PNG in a position of having to enforce a policy it can neither agree to a definition on and can not ultimately enforce.  Recently at the PNG meeting in Tampa before the Florida United Numismatists Show, the PNG approved by a resounding majority the KEEP their original Code of Ethics in regard to ‘Coin Doctoring’.

Editors Note: The “Original Section Seven” Code of Ethics Language is as follows:
To refrain from knowingly dealing in counterfeit, altered or repaired numismatic items without fully disclosing their status to my customer.
This has now been posted on the PNG website and replaces the “Coin Doctoring definition” cited above.

WHY?  In some recent online comments I have seen PNG vilified for their decision.  How could they have voted otherwise?  The proposal of changes in our Code of Ethics was FLAWED from the beginning.  How can you enforce a policy you cannot define nor ultimately enforce?

What do you as a coin enthusiast do about coin doctoring? The only answer is continuous education.  Personally I buy thousands of coins each year.  I have a ‘body bag’ box in my safe.  That box is for coins that I could not get back into holders with PCGS or NGC.  Guess what?  I missed something on virtually every one of these coins.  I missed a ‘wipe’ from a jeweler’s cloth decades before.  I missed a filed rim on a gold coin.  As I stated earlier, the grading services are getting better at detecting ‘doctored’ coins.  The most important grading lessons I have learned have been through coins I lost money on-HA!

If you buy lots of coins you are probably going to buy a DOG.  I buy a lot of coins so I get some DOGS.  My recommendation is to buy only PCGS and NGC coins with eye appeal.  CAC approved coins are highly desirable and most often exhibit both a high eye appeal and originality.  Watch out for ‘bargains’.  A raw coin that ‘should’ grade is not graded yet.  Darkly toned coins just don’t sell well.  Don’t be afraid to spend a little more for a real ‘Cherry’!  Generally speaking, coins at the dealer ‘bid’ levels probably aren’t going to be PQ-premium quality for the grade.

What else is going on in the U.S. rare coin market?  The Florida United Numismatists Show was as big as ever.  The F.U.N. Show started slowly.  Many dealers believed the three percent gold bullion price drop on Tuesday before the show put the ‘damper’ on dealer’s expectations.  Because of the holiday many F.U.N. Shows start slowly, but this year’s show stayed FLAT.  Attendance was good and the facility was adequate, but the public are still being very tentative with their purchases.  Dealer business was off too.  Many dealers commented that the show was mediocre or poor, although I heard several good reports also.  In most cases, the difference between having a ‘good’ show and ‘poor’ show comes down to having the nice coins.  We were able to both buy and sell a lot of nice coins and brought home 3 boxes of new purchases.

Each month I write a Rare Coin Market Report you can view here on CoinWeek or our Website Bozarthcoins.com.  I also write a monthly column called Rare Coin Road Warrior that discusses most major coin shows from a dealer’s perspective.  Comments are welcome.  Thanks and Best Regards, Vic  Bozarth.

By Dr Jeffrey Lewis
Gone are the days of gold coated tungsten bars, shaved or skimped ounce rounds, or completely faked gold painted coins sold as replicas. Today’s gold fakers are using alloys – not coatings – to produce some of the best fakes the physical gold market has ever seen.

More Authentic Than Ever Before
The Financial Times, a financial news source that was one of the few to bring the CTFC silver manipulation to light, has broken this new gem. Researching heavily inside Chinese gold shops, the Financial Times reports that a new alloy of bullion mixed with seven other metals provides an end product that looks, feels, and weighs just like gold. The alloy includes such metals as osmium, iridium ruthenium, copper, nickel, iron, and rhodium, and as much as 51% gold.

Some believe that such a concoction could be created only by a metal worker with years of experience and a thorough understanding of the elements that make up each metal. When mixed, the finished product is hard to detect by color, and the density is much more accurate than gold plated tungsten bars.

The explosion in faked metals is attributed mostly to three factors: increased domestic demand, the ease and anonymity of selling fakes over the internet, and rising gold prices. The question is now: with silver at $30 an ounce, will frauds discover they can shave dollars off ounces, shipping only half as much valuable metal as they claim?

Protecting Your Investment
The silver markets are ripe for such exploit, although physical silver is less rewarding to fake than gold, given the extreme price differences. However, with so many silver investors believing this often repeated line, it is probably only a matter of time before new silver fakes come pouring out of China and into the hands of collectors.

There is only one way to immediately find whether silver or gold bars are authentic with proper assaying of the metal. However, for small coins and bars, this process is hardly cost effective, and it won’t do much to keep the faked metals out of the hands of retail investors. Investors would be wise to reduce their anonymous purchase quantities through the internet or deal only with highly reputable dealers. Avoiding online auction sites and individual sellers through the internet, particularly those from China, will mitigate much of the risk.

Professional dealers should have a much cleaner supply than individuals should fake spread through the market. Large volume dealers, or those who buy directly from government and private mints, are nearly guaranteed a clean supply, while small coin and pawn shops may be more likely to buy a collection of fakes from an individual.

While there is very little that can be done, silver investors should be on high alert, as it’s only a matter of time before crooks find a new avenue to make a living. With the economy faltering, unemployment rising, and gold and silver becoming the hottest commodity on the block, there are sure to be more than a few bad apples in the market.

The author is a medical practitioner and serves as the editor of Silver-Coin-Investor.com

Article of the week

Earlier articles can be found in the archive section.

Creator of the Paduans: Giovanni da Cavino

by Ursula Kampmann

Giovanni da Cavino was born in 1500 in the city of Padua. Padua is not far from Venice and was politically ruled by that more powerful metropolis. The city, however, had its own history as centre of arts where Giotto had worked and Donatello had created the first life-size equestrian statue of Modern Times.

The Condottiere Gattamelata, the first life-size equestrian statue of Modern Times created by Donatello.

Giovanni da Cavino belonged to that new generation of craftsmen that evolved into artists. He was the son of a goldsmith. Up to the death of his father he was trained by him, after that he became an apprentice of a master called Andrea Riccio. Cavino’s first work, mentioned in contemporary documents, was two silver candlesticks he delivered between 1527 and 1529 for the Padua Cathedral. The young man also devoted himself to the rising art of medal production. In 1554, Cavino made and signed a medal with the portrait of Pope Julius III, in 1565 two medals with the image of Christ. Amongst collectors of Roman coins, however, Cavino is famous for other products. Allegedly, he is one of the first coin forgers in history.

Medal by Giovanni da Cavino. Rev. Busts of Alexander Bassianus (in the front) and of Giovanni da Cavino (behind) r. NAC 53 (2009), 569.

Cavino’s products, called Paduans after his native city Padua, are copies of the finest Roman bronze coins and are traded for their own sake today amongst connoisseurs of the Renaissance art. He created them in cooperation with the humanist and coin collector Alessandro Bassiano. In the course of his career, Cavino copied more than 100 ancient coin types; he even invented further ones he thought the just developing academic discipline of archaeology had not discovered but were worth existing. Alessandro Bassiano was his congenial partner supplying the expertise whereas Cavino possessed the artisanship.

Coin invented by Cavino that pretends to be minted by C. Julius Caesar. From CNG 132 (2006), 286.

At the times, Bassiano belonged to a small group of numismatic authors: he had already written a book on the coinage of the 12 Caesars containing drawings of coins as well as explanations on their iconography and legends. Most possibly he advised his friend in inventing a bronze coin of C. Julius Caesar.

Imitation by Cavino of a sestertius of Septimius Severus. The depiction of Mars on its reverse is not comparable with a product of a Roman mint in regard to its perception of the body. From CNG 132 (2006), 306.

Cavino’s products are easily recognisable. Their weight alone is revealing. They are minted from much thinner planchets than the actual sestertii with depictions that are considerably more delicate.

Medaillion of Caracalla with a depiction of Mars. From NAC 29 (2005), 569.

The artist was trained by Renaissance models with the bodies shown on his coins being very different from the ones we find on ancient coins. Cavino’s figures move naturally, their bodies are anatomically correct and far from appearing Roman.

Imitation by Cavino of a sestertius of Pertinax.

Cavino was least successful in imitating the Roman writing. Compared with an original sestertius of Pertinax, on the imitation by Cavino the lines of the writing appear boringly uniform.

Model for Cavino’s imitation: sestertius of Pertinax. From NAC 54 (2010), 1197.

The recesses at the letters’ beginnings and the varying depth of the die cut have become flattened and uniform. If there are still any doubts, it helps to have a look at the books devoted to the work of the Renaissance artist. They contain a most possibly complete catalogue – made with the help of the dies stored in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris – of Cavino’s imitations (Z. H. Klawans, Imitations and Inventions of Roman Coins, 1977, with comprehensive bibliography).

Was Cavino a brilliant forger that supplied the just developing market for ancient coins? Or was he rather a craftsman that – in cooperation with the best numismatist of Padua – made copies of the coins the market could not provide to be present in every collection? To answer that question, it may help to collect some information on Cavino’s reputation. Actually, he had quite a good one. He was even appointed expert witness when two goldsmiths met in court in 1542. He would not have been entrusted with such a responsible had he be a person of dubious character. Apart from that, we know that from time to time Cavino combined the reverses of his imitations not only with the portraits of Roman emperors but with the recently made portraits of influential politicians and merchants of his native city as well. That would have been silly if his imitations really had tried to deceive collectors. The last proof of Cavino being honourably is the fact the there is a number of contemporaries that praise Cavino for his imitations. The first seems to have been a colleague. Enea Vico wrote in 1555 a study on Roman coins and mentioned Cavino as imitator (not as forger!). In 1560, Francesco Savonarola even praised both “fathers” of the Paduans, Cavino and Bassiano, in a verse: Your lives, o Ceasars, will shine forever by their (= Cavino’s and Bassiano’s, authors’ note) numismatic art.
Whoever calls Cavino a forger does him an injustice. He supplied a Renaissance want. The 16th century collector was not looking for what we today call authenticity. To him, the motive was important. Genuineness was of less relevance. Hence the lengthy galleries of “fake“ and real emperors’ portraits in contemporary Halls of Antiquities. They are not displayed separately but provide a tangled picture puzzle of genuine and fake. The only important thing was to cite antiquity – whether with a piece that really had come down from Antiquity or with a piece a modern artist created in the ancient spirit.

For more information on this subject please have a look at a monograph by Richard Hoe Lawrence from 1883 on the internet. Click here.

Seeing Genuine Coin Helps to Catch Fakes

By F. Michael Fazzari, Numismatic News January 04, 2010

There have been several letters published in this newspaper offering suggestions for articles. I read the letters too and one sure way to success is to give readers topics they want.

Let me answer one of the issues dealing with counterfeit coins that all authenticators have faced in their professional career: How much information to divulge to the public about specific counterfeit coins.

I became a coin authenticator in 1972. Looking back, the fakes of that time were crude compared with some of those we see today. Armed with the knowledge we possess today, nothing back then would have been deceptive; however, authentication was also in its infancy. Forty years ago, fakes were detected by measuring their weight, diameter, fineness and style. The general use of stereo microscopes for coin authentication had not caught on even though this tool, coupled with fluorescent light, was regularly used at the U.S. Mint Lab to examine coins.

When the American Numismatic Association established their Authentication Service in Washington, D.C., a stereo microscope was on the list of necessary equipment. In a relatively short time, we realized how great an authentication tool it was. Coins looked different under high power. It became obvious; why try to authenticate a coin with the naked eye or using one eye and a 10x hand lens when you could examine the fabric of its surface closely with two eyes at up to 80x?

The counterfeits of the day “fell apart” under that close scrutiny. The ANA launched a new era of counterfeit detection. We faced a dilemma each time we discovered a new fake coin at the ANA Certification Service. Some wanted to keep all diagnostics of the new fakes private so as not to help the counterfeiters. The biggest proponent of this view wrote an entertaining column featuring fake coins; yet he rarely gave readers a clue about how to detect them.

At first, I agreed with this approach; but more liberal minds, plus the need to educate dealers and collectors convinced me that the best approach was to divulge just enough diagnostic information to help collectors even though the fakers benefited too. We knew that publishing diagnostic information would definitely make our job harder as it would help the counterfeiters improved their product.

The validity of our concern was quick to come. In the ANA counterfeit detection course at the 1974 Summer Seminar, we showed slides of a newly discovered $10 Indian counterfeit and not two months later we saw the exact same fakes at the Certification Service, but missing the diagnostic markers we had revealed to the class! Today, some counterfeits are so deceptive that I should hesitate to release any diagnostics in print but then my columns would become virtually worthless.

Enough background, let me address each reader who wishes they could open a book and look up the diagnostics for a specific counterfeit coin. It has been done before and it was only useful over a short period of time. Many of the fakes had the same dies. Soon, the book became obsolete as technology changed, the fakes improved, and we became more experienced authenticators. Remember, I’ve experienced first hand that the stereo- microscope allowed us to quickly surpass all the reference books available to us in the 1970s.

Let me suggest a better approach based on my experiences. In 1972, the Certification Service blindly followed the spurious opinion of a respected numismatic authority concerning the authentication of a foreign coin. When we learned of our error, I voiced what should have been plainly obvious at the time: “The most important requirement for coin authentication is to know what a genuine specimen looks like. That is why a book or collection of columns showing the defects of a specific counterfeit coin is less important than your own study of the characteristics found on genuine coins while using a stereo microscope. With study, you may not know for sure if a specimen is counterfeit; but you will be positive that it looks different than any genuine coin you have seen.

With that for you to think about, here is this month’s fake. Micrographs 1 shows a genuine Cuban 1915 5-peso gold coin. The piece shown in Figure 2 is a counterfeit. Both coins are virtually uncirculated. The counterfeit is a tenth of a gram light and its edge reeding does not match that of the genuine coin. Neither of these characteristics is alarming by itself. In fact, the different edge reeding became apparent only after I obtained a genuine comparison coin.

Now, let’s compare the micrographs. The digits on the counterfeit look fine until we compare them to those on the genuine coin. The genuine coin also shows radial metal flow near the edge and between the letters. Note that the shape of the denticals is different on the fake. In the shield design, there are many subtle design differences between the two coins. The key, sun, and scene are different and the horizontal lines on the fake are crude. The color of the gold is correct so the composition of the fake is good. Thus, anyone not familiar with the appearance of a genuine specimen could easily overlook this fake. If you fall into this group, it is best to purchase coins certified by a major grading service.