PCGS has issued a warning regarding counterfeit slabs which are being produced in China. The problem is so bad that PCGS is calling for eBay to ban all Chinese sellers who sell rare coins. Currently, virtually all of the Chinese-made fake PCGS slabs also have fake coins in them, but PCGS expects that this will change eventually. When it does, they expect to see genuine coins being given inflated grades or unearned designations such as Full Bell Lines or Prooflike. PCGS warns that the certification numbers on the fake slabs will almost always check out okay, since the criminals have become smart enough to use genuine certification codes now.

PCGS published a partial list of some of the most commonly seen fakes to give people an idea of what sorts of counterfeit coins are being sold by the Chinese sellers. The list can be found near the bottom of the PCGS news release about the fake slabs. The release also provides a few tips for avoiding becoming a victim of this fraud, including the common-sense standbys such as know who your seller is and whether you have any recourse for bad transactions, check the seller's feedback, don't buy from people in China, always pay with a credit card, and if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

The counterfeit PCGS slabs look very much like the genuine PCGS slabs, with only small differences to tell them apart. Unfortunately, unlike its competitor NGC, who also warned about fake NGC slabs recently, PCGS does not provide the details that would enable you or I to authenticate our own slabs. Hopefully they will change their policy and make this information freely available. After all, they're only hurting the honest public by withholding such details, since the criminals already know what the fake slabs look like!

One thing that sort of irritated me in the PCGS news release was their claim that this matter was first brought to their attention by "alert members of the PCGS message boards." In fact, the eBay watchdog group and forum community Coin Forgery eBay, (known as the "CFe,") was discussing these fake slabs long before PCGS allowed any of the related messages to go undeleted on their message boards. PCGS is widely known to be very aggressive censors of its message boards, frequently deleting messages that make PCGS look bad or espouse philosophies that they (or their moderators) disagree with. In fact, a Web site called BiddlesBank.com was formed as the rallying point against the PCGS message boards when top coin dealer Laura Sperber (Legend Numismatics) was apparently banned from the boards for expressing opinions PCGS didn't like. Right now, BiddlesBank is showing side-by-side photos of a genuine and a fake PCGS slab, along with photos of an illegal Chinese coin counterfeiting operation, including photos of the coin press being used and the counterfeit dies themselves! Unfortunately, the anonymous owner of BiddlesBank changes his content frequently, so I hope it is still there when you go to look. (Note: BiddlesBank refers to the PCGS discussion forums as the "CU forum." CU stands for Collectors Universe, which is the parent company of PCGS, and technically the proper name for what most people (including PCGS itself) simply call the "PCGS message boards.")