Counterfeit Detection: 1924-S Standing Liberty Quarter

Wow! How many non-contemporary counterfeits are floating around in our collections?

It's interesting that weight, dimensions, and gross metal composition assessments aren't mentioned. You'd think this would be especially helpful with a fake thought to be from the depression era, as the main point of counterfeits at that time was to make fakes from less expensive metals and counterfeiting technology was less exact than it's become.

Without those more definite physical assessments to support the conclusion, a purely aesthetic assessment has at least some potential caveats.

For example, the mint mark appears to be an S/S repunched mint mark (RPM). This suggests the coin was produced from a hand punched die. From what I've read, counterfeiters don't use hand punched dies, only the mint does.

A counterfeiter would either have intentionally wanted to include an RPM in the design, which seems counterintuitive if their goal is to pass it off as bonafide, or happen to use an unattributed RPM, something likely pretty rare, as the template coin used in producing a fake die, then not noticed the glaring flaw.

In regards to mushy features, in this particular case, it seems to my naive eye that it could also be at least somewhat attributed to a worn die and circulation wear.

I'm not saying this is any more of a definitive assessment. I'm saying it's hard to know definitely if this coin is a fake without doing some simple assessments of its physical and chemical properties.

By the way, if anyone has a "counterfeit" like this they'd like to sell, please PM me. I am obsessed with unattributed SLQ RPMs and would be interested.

Thanks apacel258 for the link to the article. The information on silver content seems pretty definitive. That said, there's still some things nagging at me.

One of these came up on ebay back in April (2024). I attached an image of the area around the RPM I still have on my phone. Unfortunately the ebay ad is no longer up, so I only have a partial image. Perhaps if someone at Executive Coin Company, who canceled the auction and declined to sell me the coin when I tracked them down, might have a better image.

The ebay specimen has less circulation wear and damage than the coin in the article, and may have been a stronger strike.

As a consequence, as you can see, the mintmarks and other elements seem less crude than the specimen in the article, which is supposedly the most telling aspect of the counterfeit.

The repunched mintmarks are not exactly standard, but SLQ RPMs can get a bit tweaked during the repunching process.

The article states that the split in the star is due to retooling, and that is also one of the most telling aspects of the forgery.
There's more detail on the ebay specimen. There's splits on the star and there's also splits in the 9 on the date. The splits on the 9 can't be seen on the coin in the article due to circulation wear. It may just be me, but the splits on the star and the 9 on the ebay specimen, when taken together, look to me more like standard doubling, not retooling. I've even convinced myself that the 1 is too wide on the coin in the ebay ad, despite the fact that it is too worn to tell.

At this point, to provide a counterpoint, I've had to evoke a RPM occurred concurrently with a DDO, which is sounding a bit thin. Moreover, there still seems to be the irrefutable evidence that the specimen in the article has nonstandard silver content, 91.5% silver instead of 90%, which is too far outside the norm to likely be just variation in the alloy.

But even that kind of seems odd to me. I get that trying to use standard levels of silver could reduce risk of detection. It just seems not an insubstantial cost, as that would translate into roughly 12 cents worth of silver per coin if the counterfeit was also made the standard weight to evade detection (sliver was 68 cents an ounce in 1924).

Again, I am not saying that the assessment in the article is incorrect. I would just love to know about other specifications, such as the weight, diameter, and width of the counterfeit. Maybe someone at Executive Coin could illuminate us if they happen upon this post, or if I call them and ask them to check.

There's is one thing that makes me hope that this is a fake. I often think about the coin in the ebay ad. It was among the most striking SLQ unattributed repunched mintmarks I've come across. If it is a fake, at least I can finally write it off my list of coins I think about way too often, the ones that got away. Although I would still love to have one either way.

Other than the mint mark, this one is very deceiving.

I agree with Coinfrog....this is quite scary. I have seen pics of certified examples of these coins that have those types of lines on them, which I always wrote off as die polishing. Guess I need to be careful even with certs because even they are not always perfectly correct. Good example is how many of these I have seen that are FH but do not have an earhole or are flat in the temple area.