Bored and can't sleep here at 1am, so figured I would share a little story.
I've made mention before, my father-in-law gave me a chunk of his coin collection a while back. He collected in the 70's and 80's. As he was looking over what he wanted to give me, he pulls this out, gave it a hard look front and back, hands it to me and says it's a copy.
He proceeded to tell me that one of his friends had been an avid collector of high end coins way back in time. They decided to experiment in casting a copy of this coin to fill a hole in his collection. While only a copy, at some point he assigned a market value of $6,200.
The holder was just marked 1802/0
Half Cent. I had noticed the defects on the reverse copied over from the original, the two lines running from leaf to edge between the letters "ME" but didn't think much of it.
I decided to go have a look at PCGS to see whether this copy was the reverse of 1800 or 1802 variety. Yes, it is just a copy, but it appears to be a copy of the finest known example of 1802/0 reverse of 1802 which PCGS graded XF45, auctioned by Stacks back in 2017 for $190k and is the plate coin for this variety on the PCGS site.
https://www.pcgs.com/coinfacts/coin/detail/1057I thought this was interesting and amusing given all of the fakes we see today.
First two sets of pics are of the copy. The last it just a snipit of the reverse of the real deal showing the lines that match the copy.
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