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Counterfeit Coins


Hillbilly

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I recently received a quarter back from my bank.  The coin sorter they use spits out any foreign, metallic, bent, or sticky coins.

 

As I pondered why I got this quarter back, I grabbed my magnet to run through the small pile of coins to check for steel pennies. The quarter in question stuck to the magnet. Jingling it with other quarters will produce a metallic sound similar to what a silver quarter will sound like but a much deeper tone. In the same batch was a penny that has front hollowed out.  Closer inspection of the penny shows that it is a steel blank with a layer of copper/zinc around it.  

 

I went back and talked to the bank.  They told me that the counterfeiting of bills has become so complicated that some are moving to coins because the cost of producing is much cheaper to do and it is easier to pass them off.

 

Anybody else ran across this?

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good mechs check for metal content, weight and size.

but as they wear out most of the system fails.

and some cheap mechs don't even check all three.

Beaver is the only one that checks size and content. The rest are just size. Don't know of any bulk that check weight

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I've had arcade tokens, foreign coins (turkish lira) and slugs in my machines before.

 

Just a cost of doing business I guess....it's WAY under .1% of everything I collect so not that big of a deal imo.  (I actually keep the foreign coins/others for fun)

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Did the quarter look exactly like a regular quarter or was more like a slug?

Looks just like a real quarter.  I can not tell them apart other than the sound they make when jingled with other coins or dropped on the table.

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I did the magnet thing, I didn't find any counterfeit quarters, I did find 5c Euro coin that looked like copper but stuck to the magnet and a Mexician 2$ coin that has a dime size inner brass coin with an outer nickel or steel ring.

My Glory coin counter rejects most anything that isn't sized right so I was surprised to find these got through.

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