Los Angeles – It looked like the “deal of the century,” police said, a couple of guys down on their luck on Skid Row, selling valuable old silver coins for $20 apiece.
It was a pretty good deal too, but only for the sellers. The coins they were peddling turned out to be as worthless as $3 bills.
“They’re such blatant counterfeits that all you have to do is give them a once over with your eyeballs to know they’re fakes,” said Ron Guth, president of Professional Coin Grading Service in Irvine, Calif.
Take, for example, the 1796 silver dollar, worth perhaps $3.5 million if it were real. There were 13 stars around Lady Liberty’s head on these, representing the 13 original U.S. colonies. The only problem is, the real coin contains 15 stars.
Then there was the 1832 George Washington quarter, a rare find indeed, seeing as how Washington didn’t start appearing on the quarter until 1932.
Investigators are still trying to find the source of the coins, which were confiscated from two street peddlers. Los Angeles Police Detective Michael Montoya said he has heard they are sold in novelty shops where they are packaged in the same kind of protective wrapping that coin collectors use but marked as “replicas.” Enterprising transients might be buying low, removing the stickers and selling high to increasing numbers of young professionals moving into expensive condos on the edge of Los Angeles’ most destitute neighborhood, he said.
“Somebody sees them and thinks, ‘Wow, this guy’s got a coin worth thousands of dollars, and he’s down on his luck, so I’m going to get it for 20 bucks and sell it,”‘ Montoya said. “They think they’re getting the deal of the century, and then they get it appraised and it’s worth like a dollar.”
And that’s only if it contains any real silver, said Guth, who says he is seeing more and more fake coins turning up.
“About once a week, we get an inquiry from someone in the Philippines that bought one,” he said, adding that the word in the industry is that they are minted in Asia.
