1881 CC Morgan Dollar Authentication Help

Admittedly, I'm not great at detecting fakes, but..... weight should be 26.7 grams, the CC mint mark looks funny to me, missing details on both obverse & reverse make me suspicious. Others will be along to authenticate.

Have to agree.

100% fake

From the Seller: It's about 21.5grams

I agree that it is most likely counterfeit. thanks everyone

Learn what the real thing looks like and you won't be confused by 95% of the fakes out there. When you've seen dozens or hundreds of 1881-CC Morgan dollars, or Morgan dollars in general, you get a feel for how the coins look.

You can educate a collector on what to look for. The date, the mintmark, the overall appearance of the surfaces. The matches (or not) with known die varieties (VAM's.) The weight, the metallic composition (XRF.) How it sounds when you set it down on a surface. (But that's no defense if the coin is struck in the correct alloy, or reasonably close.)

But it's like trying to teach someone who's never seen a bird before the difference between a crow and a hawk. You can talk to them all you want about wing length, body shape, color, patterns, birdsong, behavior, bone structure, flight patterns, nesting, or any other technical or biological aspect of ornithology. Alternatively, you can show them a few pictures of crows, and a few pictures of hawks, and they'll most likely be able to distinguish between the two 95% of the time.

The same thing is true with coins. When it comes to frequently-counterfeited coins, I'd rather teach an aspiring collector by showing them actual examples than by launching into exhausting detail of the technical aspects of each.

The corollary is that 5% of the fakes out there are good enough to fool 95% of the collectors. This is especially true of certain classic US gold coins and (to a lesser extent) certain early American copper issues. But this coin is not one of those cases.

Chinese counterfeit.

Fake ... evil people selling these every day !

Over here in the Colonies they had no qualms against counterfeiting British, Spanish, Portuguese and local (Colonial) issues, and many had done so quite openly since at least the latter half of the 17th century. However, the penalties steadily escalated, and by the mid 18th c. there were executions by hanging in some cases. Just prior to the Revolution in, e.g., Connecticut, you could be sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor or executed by hanging if you were a second-time offender when it came to being convicted of forging bills or counterfeiting coins. Across the pond, counterfeiting regal issues could also result in execution by hanging (this lasted until at least the 1810s.)

Of course, the flip side of that is that it's also been suggested that counterfeiting and forging operations helped enable the success of the Revolution (by keeping real coins that arrived in the Colonies and sending underweight counterfeits back across as payment of duties and taxes, by forging bills and documents, etc.) Many famous early American engravers also just happened to be expert forgers...