What's your favorite counterfeit you have? 3 3

[A user]

Any counterfeits are funny.

[diver123]

Bought a belt/buckle with 1937D nickel (obverse showing). Silver buckle, coin is bezel-set, so a -shoot on number of legs on bison. Seller stated 80 - 90% certainty it's a 3-legger. Bought it, it's a 3-legger. Listed the coin on eBay, flagged for "counterfeit". Who knows? Looks authentic under my 60X loupe.

[Jackson LeCount]

These are my counterfeit coins. The real coins are very common so the counterfeiters must have been doing it to spend them which means it had to have been done in the late 1600s to early 1700s. I got them with a bunch of real ones on eBay.

They're from the polish Lithuanian commonwealth.

[ldhair]

[Quintus Arrius]

I am sorry to report I have been deprived of the pleasure of owning a genuine counterfeit coin or bill. But I do have my Want List engraved in my memory.

The first is any one of a number of pewter fifty-cent pieces produced by Edward John Wellman in his car, a 1941 Buick. An account of his inevitable arrest, in pertinent part, reads as follows:  After escaping from a jail in Coral Gables, Florida--unlocking his cell door with the mainspring of an alarm clock he had brought in with him, he was recognized by a Secret Service man in New York's Flushing Meadow Park's Skating Rink where "he was dazzling everybody  with a whizzing glide to the center of the ice that ended in a triumphant pirouette." As he came out of the pirouette, he was arrested... and sent to a Federal penitentiary.

Item #2 on my secret Want List (to the eternal dismay of rather vocal anti-counterfeitists on this Forum) is any one of the thousands of one-dollar bills printed and passed in New York City over a ten-year span by Edward Mueller, the manhunt for whom by the Secret Service, "exceeded in intensity and scope any other manhunt in the chronicles of counterfeiting. ["The idea of money is older than the idea of counterfeit money  but older, perhaps by no more than a few minutes."] Mr. Mueller's bills were described as follows:  "Clearly no criminal mastermind had produced [them]. It was printed on a piece of cheap paper, available at stationery stores all over. At best the artwork was crude, childish even. A black splotch served as Washington's left eye, his right was almond shaped. Letters and numbers were poorly formed, illegible, or uneven. In addition to the fanciful artwork, one batch of bills featured an unbelievable typo -- "Wahsington."  This only infuriated the local Secret Service and the former agent once assigned to the local office who had since been elevated to chief, in Washington, D.C.

(To be continued, at the discretion of Moderation.)

(Edit:  I have since learned my next post may be my last; I believe I will leave the conclusion of this story, well enough alone.)

 

 

 

Edited July 14, 2022 by Quintus Arrius
(Self-explanatory.)