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I notice that parts of L, 1 and 9 are also chopped off. Lots of deep hits to the portrait. How do you run across a 1944 US cent in India? I'm imagining it may have traveled there during WWII.

I recommend installing Coinoscope on your phone, take picture of coin and the app looks it up for you. Then use the world coin price guide here or at Numista. World coins are fun to have but I'm guessing most of these are worth very little. The 1918 France 50 centimes is silver but in that condition maybe $2.50, for example. The "blue point" is not a world coin but a WWII ration token, given in change for ration stamps. https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces42308.html

You can find both of these by searching. There are a few for sale. Like coins, condition is everything with currency collectors and yours are in very poor shape.

Very cool. Was anyone in your family a spy?

Looks like a die clash with Jefferson's eye. http://www.maddieclashes.com/five-cent-overlays/

https://www.ngccoin.com/price-guide/united-states/

Throdore was the Hobbit president.

Well that's odd. I don't think it wasn't minted like that - how could it fit in the press? It's like a magician's coin or snuff box, but I've never seen one like it. Does it unscrew? I suppose you could weigh it and if it's a lot lighter than 3 coins you'd know there's a hollow space in there. If you don't mind possibly hurting the "coins" I suppose you could soak it in Liquid Wrench or something and see if it comes apart (it may be sealed with corrosion).

33% underweight is way too much. Check your scale with known pocket change, make sure it's accurate. Otherwise all the missing detail deep in the hair area would make me say fake anyway.

https://www.ngccoin.com/coin-explorer/lincoln-cents-wheat-reverse-1909-1958-pscid-99/1944-1c-msbn-coinid-12720 In that condition, you'd be lucky to get 5 cents. 1.4 billion of them minted, very common coin.

I appreciate that there are a spectrum of opinions on this. Ultimately it's up to the TPG how they want to handle it, and their customers should go into it understanding and accepting that. To me, "UNC Details" is mostly useless as a grade. It informs me that a professional grader decided that something unacceptable happened to the coin, but beyond that I'm left to grade it myself. I would much prefer to have a technical MS65 "lightly cleaned" than a straight-grade MS60 bag marked within an inch of its life. I have to make that determination on my own.

The interesting thing to me is the OP posts at 8:31pm asking for advice and by 9:32pm it's over. with MS70 and olive oil and then talking about retoning with sulfur. Whew. It's almost 150 years old. I would have just left it alone.

PMD. Looks like it was put on a lathe or something.

The T would be upside-down though, right? And it would be in the upper left columns if the dies were aligned properly. Seems like plating bubbles is the easy answer.

It's way too small to be a T from TRUST though, isn't it?

There's no love lost over there with me. If they spent half the time researching unique coins that they spend playing Stalin on their forum, I think they'd be a lot better off.

I recently noted that the 1964 50c "first day of issue" from that mint bag are also apparently all graded "Brilliant Uncirculated". I'm not sure if I get it either; sort of a throwback to that era. I don't recall anything being labelled "gem" or "near gem" when I first started collecting in the early 70s. "BU" was the highest I was aware of, but on lawn mowing money I wasn't looking at top-shelf items. It would be interesting to know the origin of "brilliant uncirculated", because I don't remember anything being "ordinary uncirculated". What was so "brilliant" about it? "AU" was even worse for me back then - was it "almost" uncirculated, or "average" uncirculated, as opposed to "brilliant"? Fortunately, I always thought it meant "almost", as in, nice try but not quite.

I have not even looked there in six+ months. The president himself started a topic about their "unwritten rules", and when I asked what their rules were for removing threads that were somehow deemed embarrassing to them, I was immediately banned. The president simultaneously insinuates that I'm involved in some kind of conspiracy, with a new "Rule 11" - "If a user is banned for violating rules and/or being rude and another user attempts to turn it into a conspiracy about something completely unrelated, that user will also be banned." The whole "we're the best, we're infallible" thing over there is nuts. It sounds like it hasn't changed. Like you, I appreciate NGC.

Nobody likes being Captain Buzzkill on somebody's road to riches. JKK is right; learning to find known examples and comparing with your own is a good skill to develop, as is finding the resources to identify what is known already. It's a long and never-ending process. That said, the 0.0001% is achievable, particularly in overlooked series. Even a dolt like me has discovered, or at least documented, new transition varieties and an RPD in the Barber dimes. I think there are still plenty of RPDs etc in that series waiting to be documented. Lincoln cents, not likely. And beware of how the motivation for quick riches clouds people's judgement to the point of insanity. There's an example of this lunatic behavior on this forum right now.

Have you looked at images of graded examples? It's clearly not FS-101 if that's what you're thinking. What I'm seeing, in my head I call "luster doubling", where there is a reflective surface next to digits/letters that makes it look like "doubling" but isn't even raised above the surface. I don't know if it's technically "machine doubling" (MD) or what, but it's very common.

At the time this letter was written, Coca-Cola contained cocaine. It was the real thing.

Love the Columbus medal. But did they screw up 1492? The three Roman numeral calculators I tried say "MCDXCII". Here's my recent arrival.

What is the secret to getting this discount email?

Uh, so is this the super-rare imaginary CC?

Looks like a bad counterfeit to me. Even if it was real, it's not an 1889-CC, so it's common, not rare. In that condition you'd be lucky to get $15 melt value.