Future of U.S. Coin Authentication

Identifying fakes is an art and a science

- TOM DELOREY

Coin authentication can be both an art and a science, but the science part is better. When I started working for the American Numismatic Association Certification Service (ANACS) in November of 1978, with the ultimate goal of starting an additional grading service for ANA, I was first trained as an authenticator. After all, there is no point in grading a coin if it is counterfeit, altered, or otherwise not an original numismatic item.

Back then, the process of authentication—the determination of whether or not a numismatic item is both genuine and original—required the ability to look at an item with a good eye for detail and a good memory of what you had seen before. Eventually, I trained several authenticators myself, and I can assure you that some people have a better eye for detail than others. I suspect now that people who like to do jigsaw puzzles make the best authenticators, but that is just a guess.

Of course, some memory aids and records are important. The first generation of ANACS authenticators (the service opened in 1972) made drawings on index cards showing die characteristics of both genuine coins and counterfeits. A classic example of a genuine coin characteristic would be the diagonal die scratch inside the incused T of LIBERTY on an 1893-S Morgan dollar. Only one obverse die was used to strike the entire press run of this issue, so if an 1893-S dollar does not have this die characteristic, subject to damage or excessive wear in this generally well-protected area, the coin is not genuine.