John Frost writes:

At the recently concluded Houston Money Show, weconfirmed the existence of a new and extremelydeceptive 1872-S Seated half dollar. Although we willdescribe the discovery and the subsequentinvestigation in the March 2017 issue of the GobrechtJournal, we did not want to wait until then to publicizethis new counterfeit. There are now five of theseknown and more will surely appear in the meantime.

They are good enough that two of them have alreadyfooled the major grading services. Four of thecounterfeits sold on Ebay in August 2015, October2015, March 2016, and August 2016. The fifthappeared at auction this past summer, and may havebeen the second or third example from Ebay (but thatisn't known).

Although there are numerous die markers that weused in the investigation, the key pick-up points todetect this counterfeit are the following (and seen inthe photos below).

Note: both of these pick-up points are perfectlylegitimate on some 1875-S coins, but not on 1872-S.

The counterfeit will be presented as part of the LSCCmeeting at FUN next week (Friday at 9:00 a.m.), andit will be available for examination at both themeeting as well as the LSCC-BCCS club table (#740)on the bourse floor.

Be on the lookout for this new counterfeit! If any ofyou see additional examples, the LSCC would beinterested in hearing about them. If you can providethe timeframe in which you see them, and the source(e.g., Ebay, auction, local dealer, show, etc.), thatwould be very helpful. Please notify us at the LSCCemail address, lscc@lsccweb.org. Thank you!

And look for the full details in the March GobrechtJournal.

To read the complete article, see:
Be on the Lookout! New dangerous counterfeit1872-S Liberty Seated Half(www.lsccweb.org/144-Supplement-Jan2017-BOLO-1872S-counterfeit.pdf)