You Thought It Was More

Louis Colavecchio with Franz Douskey and Andy Thibault 426 pages. $24.99, $9.99 on Kindle

Louis Colavecchio's book cover describes him as the "World's Greatest Counterfeiter". That seems to be a standard claim for the genre. Who would want to read a book about the 2nd or 3rd greatest counterfeiter?

Colavecchio counterfeited casino chips, not coins or paper money. He seems to have counterfeited a great deal of chips, enough that casinos have stopped using them.

When I read about counterfeiters I want to see a picture of their fake next to an original. As is typical in these accounts, Colavecchio's lacks coin photography or pictures and drawings of any kind. The cover collage depicts seven casino chips, two steel dies for $100 chips, Colavecchio himself, a slot machine, and a pile of gold-colored coins that look like 1 euro pieces. This is disappointing. Colavecchio claims drafting skills and kept a contraband ruler concealed for years while in prison. I would have liked some technical drawings included in the book.

Chapter 1 is about making and selling counterfeit sweaters in the early 1960s. Chapter 2 is making statuettes using lost wax casting. Chapters 4-6 are about managing jewelry stores. Chapter 8 is about making phone phreaker red boxes and telephone slugs. (The slugs were made around 1980.) 10 and 11 are about importing and modifying sports cars. 13 covers jewelry manufacturing. Chapters 14-17 discuss casino chip counterfeiting (70 pages). Chapters 18-21 discuss jail, court, and prison. The other chapters are about who got whacked in Rhode Island in the 1960s and 70s, and why. Actually all the chapters are about crime and women.

Colavecchio's telephone slugs are only mentioned briefly.

The casino chip dies were made using Electrical Discharge Machining, the process called "spark-erosion counterfeiting" in the numismatic trade. (See Max Spiegel's article on NGC to see an example of a collector coin created with spark eroded dies). A 320 ton Mario Di Maio press was used to strike the chips.

Colavecchio forged both metal and plastic chips. A lot of the counterfeiting discussion in the book concerns getting the correct weight and color out of plastic materials. These discussions may not appear important to the coin collector, but recall that the country or rebel province Transnistria recently started issuing circulating plastic coins.

Colavecchio's writing, or perhaps the writing of his two co-authors, is good. I found all the mob and crime stuff presented in an entertaining way. (The typesetting is poor and there are lots of bogus commas and line spacing issues, but that doesn't reflect on the writing.) The book is well worth reading if you like true crime or counterfeiting. Although Colavecchio brags about having secrets the US Mint needed to consult him on, most of the tips, and that he made amazing improvements to his EDM machine, this book does not go into more detail than other books on coin forgery. This is an entertaining story about criminals, not a technical manual.

Smithsonian now able to digitize 400 numismatic objects per hour

An article by Max Kutner in Smithsonian Magazine discusses efforts to digitize 250,000 bank notes, tax stamps, and war bonds from the National Numismatic Collection.

Twenty people are able to digitize 3500 items per day, suggesting the whole project will take 72 business days. They use a conveyor belt and 80 megapixel imaging system. The team previously had success digitizing 45,000 bumblebees in 40 days.

The cost per object is less than a dollar.

Fictional bridges on Euro banknotes constructed in the Netherlands

“'The European Bank didn't want to use real bridges so I thought it would be funny to claim the bridges and make them real,' [Dutch designer Robin Stam] told Dezeen.”

(via Marginal Revolution)

3D coin scans using focus stacking

On CoinCommunity.com, DVCollector shows a 3D scan of an Athenian tetradrachm. He took 56 pictures of the coin, each with a different focus, and used Helicon software to produce an image in extreme focus as well as 3D animation. Impressive!

Counterfeit 25 peso coin lab in the Dominican Republic

According to Dominican Today (no byline),

... Police ... dismantled an underground laboratory being used for forging 25 peso coins, following a raid on a house in the Sabana Perdida neighborhood of Santo Domingo North.

...

According to the police report, three machines used for manufacturing false 25 peso coins were seized during the operation, along with two engines, a drying oven and dozens of coins ready for processing.

...

In recent weeks traders and motorbike taxi divers in the area of La Caleta, Boca Chica have complained of being cheated by customers paying them for products and services with fake 25 peso coins.

The coins have a face value equivalent to 57 cents. Web site commentators suggest the counterfeiting story is unlikely. I disagree, given the large numbers of counterfeit UK pounds.

Unusual coin denomination: the spesmilo

I had been previously unfamiliar with the Spesmilo symbol. It apparently was only used on a single 'coin', a 1912 fantasy issue of the Esperanto congress. (The NGC web site lists examples in MS60 and XF40). According to Wikipedia the coin was used before the first world war by a few British and Swiss banks

Unicode has assigned the symbol U+20B7 SPESMILO SIGN.

The denomination was planned to equal 0.8g of 22k gold, or about 1/2 a US dollar, 2 shillings in Britain, or one Russian Ruble. It was supposed to be worth 1000 spesmiloj. The denomination is obsolete: Esperanto fantasies struck after 1945 are based on the imaginary Stelo system, not the Spesmilo.

On the Mac if I try to enter the Spesmilo sign I do NOT see the expected Sm abbreviation. Instead I see a P with a line through it. I have pasted it here: ₷. I have no idea what you will see. It is supposed to look like this:

The P with a line through it is the new currency symbol for the Russian Ruble. Microsoft has apparently rolled out support for the new Symbol in Windows. The Mac, at least mine running 10.8.5, has placed that glyph at the code point for the Spesmilo sign ... a denomination equal to one ruble.

Counterfeit US currency by MrMouse sold online

According to a blog post by Brian Krebs, a counterfeiter (or middleman) who goes by the alias MrMouse is selling high quality US notes at 45% of face value, payable in BitCoin.

MrMouse says his single-ply bills do not have magnetic ink, and so they won’t pass machines designed to look for the presence of this feature. However, this fraudster claims his $100 bill includes most of the other security features that store clerks and cashiers will look for to detect funny money, including the watermark, the pen test, and the security strip.

In addition, MrMouse says his notes include “microprinting,” tiny lettering that can only be seen under magnification (“USA 100″ is repeated within the number 100 in the lower left corner, and “The United States of America” appears as a line in the left lapel of Franklin’s coat). The sourdough vendor also claims his hundreds sport “color-shifting ink,” ...

I had no trouble finding the actual ads using search keywords mrmouse counterfeit.

K Foundation Burn A Million Quid

Early in the morning of 23 August 1994, in an abandoned boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1,000,000 pounds. It was the majority of the fortune they had earned in their brief career as pop stars (their band was The KLF).

This Saturday will be the 20th anniversary.

You can watch the burning on YouTube. There is also a television interview. A book on the burning, K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (1997) is available on Amazon for $10. AbeBooks has a copy of the book for £0.60.

Do the coins of Antiochos IV depict the Medusa Rondanini?

The Seleukid emperor Antiochos IV, who ruled from 175 BC until his death in 164 BC, gave the Athenians a golden aegis with the Gorgon upon it. Presumably Pausanias, who lived in the 2nd century AD, actually saw the aegis at the theater in Athens.

What did the golden aegis look like? Antiochos IV actually had some of his bronze and small silver coins minted in Antioch depicting an aegis, perhaps the very aegis that Pausanias would see three centuries later.

CNG, e-auction 124, lot 92

The most famous Medusa from ancient times is the Medusa Rondanini. The marble Rondanini sculpture is an important piece of Cultural Property in Italy, and has been depicted occasionally on their currency such as the 1948 1000 lire note.

Janer Danforth Belson has suggested the Medusa Rondanini is a copy of the aegis Antiochos IV gave the Athenians. Belson believes “Classicizing features for the gorgoneion would have been chosen intentionally as an artistic tribute to the sculptural stype of Pheidias and his chryselephantine creation.” Belforth says “… the gorgoneion shown on this coin has many of the same iconographic features of the Medusa Rondanini rather than the usual round faces of the ‘grotesque’ type.”

If Antiochos IV's coins depict the Rondinini (or it's original) as Edward Newell first suggested in 1918, then Antiochos IV's aegis coin reverse provides an important contemporary reference confirming Belson's theory. Does the coin match? (Scroll back and compare them). I would say not much. It is possible the Rondinini only copies the center gorgoneion of the Athenian's aegis. Unfortunately the bronze coins are not detailed enough to make a positive identification. Antiochos also issued small silver coins depicting an aegis, but they are so small the gorgoneion is only a few millimeters across.

An even rarer coin type of Antiochos IV's depicts a side-facing winged head usually described as Medusa. I wondered if it could possibly depict the same sculpture.

First I had to find a side-view of the Medusa Rondinini. I had a hard time! Nothing on the regular internet shows the Rondinini from the side. I finally found the side view in Adolf Furtwängler's 1895 book Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture. I have placed it beside an image of the coin from the 2009 catalog by Münzen & Medaillen of the Roland Müller collection. The coin is rotated and scaled to match Furtwängler's picture.

I believe there is quite a resemblance!

Arthur Houghton and Catherine Lorber suggest the side-facing Medusa coins were struck at Antiochos IV's mint in Mallos. They connect Medusa iconography with later tetradrachms of Mallos that depict Athena with an aegis draped over her shoulders and back. This is possible, but I prefer connecting Medusa iconography with the forward facing aegis struck at the Antioch mint.

And with the Medusa Rondinini.

Dave Surber (of Wildwinds) collection being auctioned Tuesday

Many of you use Wildwinds.com, a web site cataloging ancient coins built in 2000 by Dave Surber.

Dave Surber passed away suddenly five years ago. His collection is being auctioned on Tuesday by Agora Auctions. 46 Greek coins, 61 Roman Provincial, 133 Roman Imperial, 21 Byzantine and Medieval. 26 lots of books. 35 group lots.

Collectors' source for Zero Rupee Notes

Collectors may obtain Fifth Pillar's anti-corruption Zero Rupee Notes from Joel's Coins. As of this writing Joel's price is $2/note (but cheaper in quantity.)

The 50 Rupee note that the anti-corruption piece mimics has an exchange value of 83 US cents. Thus in single quantities and encased in plastic the anti-corruption note is worth more than what it mimics, at least to collectors.

Of course, you can always download and print your own notes. Because of this it will be difficult for collectors to distinguish the notes distributed by Fifth Pillar from ink-jet printed notes.

Although Fifth Pillar printed more than a million of these notes and has been distributing them for six years they have been scarcer than hen's teeth on the collectors' market. Fifth Pillar's concept of using imitation bills to discourage corruption has been widely reported. Stories appeared in The Economist (and here), CNN, the World Bank's blog, and NumisMaster. Fifth Pillar also made a video.

This note will be historically important. Collectors of paper money should consider obtaining an example.

Quarter deliveries, for laundry

The web site washboard.co is offering “Quarters for laundry, delivered monthly”. Prices as low as $14.99 for $10 in quarters a month, with two day shipping.

A parody? Every laundromat I've used had a change machine. But I suspect the site is real.

Unicode 7 adds symbol for Azeri Manat symbol

We can now typeset the Azerbaijani currency symbol, the Azeri Manat, as it has been added to Unicode 7.0.

Code.az reported that the symbol gained wide use in 2012, appearing on advertisements and markets in Azerbaijan. The code is U+20BC. If your browser, OS, and font support it you will see the symbol here: ₼

(On my browser (FireFox, Mac OS X 10.8) I see the new Ruble character, and not the M-like manat symbol.)

Older websites, such as Currency Symbols, describe the currency using the Cyrillic abreviation ман. The full list of Unicode currency symbols can be obtained from unicode.org.

Hungarian central bank shreds old notes for heating

Hungarian central bank shreds old notes for heating (2012)

A Greek die deteriorates

For many years I suspected the animated coins above were modern forgeries. The first die in the animation looks very strange. There are dots within the snakes surrounding Medusa, a very unusual feature. The first die shows blunders, such as two dots on the tongue. The snakes near the cheek have poorly made circles.

The reverse die has some unusual features. It appears octagonal rather than the typical round or square. The shackle above the anchor seems to float above it. There are weird scratches on it.

For years I gathered images from this coin and die-linked coins, hoping to prove it was fake. I was even working on an essay explaining my reasoning. Some of the die-linked coins have strange die re-engravings and post-strike damage.

I now think it is genuine. Stay tuned.

Checking die matches with Gimp

Recently I tried to compare the dies between an XF specimen and a damaged one. I mistakenly thought both dies matched, but actually only the obverses seem to match.

Let me explain how I use Gimp software to compare dies in the difficult cases.

First we need two coin images that are exactly the same size and rotation.

I use Gimp on the Mac. After opening the image I use the Measure Tool to check the number of pixels and the angle between two things. For example I will use the tips of the anchor.

If the angles I wrong I use the Rotate Tool to get the coin into a close orientation. Instead of eyeballing it I type in the difference in angles into the Rotate Tool's dialog box.

Then I use Image->Scale Image… to get the two images exactly equal in size. I haven't found an easy way to do this with Gimp; I use Gimp's percentage scaling and cross-multiplication. For example if one image has 330 pixels between two points, and other has 300 pixels I will do 330*100/300 to get the percentage.

Then I use Image->Canvas Size to increase one image. Next I select the other image, and Copy, and select the image with the large canvas, and Edit->Paste as New Layer. The New Layer part is very important. I get an image like this:

Then I go to the Layer, Channels, Paths, Undo window, and change the Mode from Normal to one of the merging ones, like "Grain merge."

If you aren't in the Rectangle Tool at this point enter it by clicking R on the keyboard. Then using the arrow keys walk the layer around until it is positioned precisely.

Then Save As. Choose a filename ending in .gif. Tell it to save the layers as animation with 1000ms between transitions.
Oops. Not a match. I had looked at undamaged places which were very close.
A match. Note especially all the snakes line up.

Hopefully you can see the obverses match and the reverses don't.

It is somewhat tricky with the obverses, because of the damage and the camera angle.

Photoshop software also has this ability, although I don't know the precise commands to work with layers in Photoshop.

Let's not forget to comment on the ancient Egyptian coins for the proposed MOU

Last week Peter Tompa suggested we should comment on a proposed emergency restrictions on the import of ancient Egyptian coins being considered by the US State Department.

I don't have much to say about Egyptian coins. I have three in my collection. I don't see a sudden surge of them in dealer inventories; but I haven't really looked.

These US-only MOUs are annoying. An example of my frustration: the picture below shows two ancient coins struck for the Greek city-state of Apollonia Pontika circa 400 BC. Around 630 AD the area was conquered by Bulgarians. The US signed a Memorandum creating import restrictions on material of Bulgarian origin in January, 2014.

What's unusual about the coins below is that the first is broken and has bits flaking off. It was sold openly on eBay Germany by a well-known long-time ancient coin dealer as a 'fourree', or silver-plated ancient counterfeit, in 2012. Yet the second coin seems to be struck properly in solid silver. It was also offered openly in an online German auction, but in March 2014, and without the paperwork to get the coin into the United States. So I declined to bid.

It certainly would have been interesting to bring those two coins together. It shouldn't be possible for the same dies to create both a fourree and a silver coin… Perhaps the first is not a fourree, but merely crystallized? Luckily I own the former, and now I'm incredibly curious to figure out what it really is. Yet what I really want is to have a chance to rejoin it with it's brother; a chance I almost had, but missed. The US stopped letting collectors import coins from Apollonia Pontika two months before this coin was offered. I will continue looking for an example with more documentation, but it can be difficult to find matches at all, let alone well-documented ones.

Egyptian coins from the Greek, Roman, and early Islamic periods are collected in the United States, yet also in Europe and in Arabia. If the US were joining a coin export ban popularly supported in Egypt and being implemented in other collecting countries it would be reasonable to support implementing it here. Having the US Customs go it alone without multinational support seems likely to have no effect on world collector markets nor on Egyptian archeology.

Read Peter's piece and if you agree follow his instructions.

UPDATE: added image in response to comment 1

WESPNEX coin show in Westchester County, NY

Last week there was a coin show in Westchester County, NY. The Westchester Stamp Coin and Paper Money show.

Over 30 coin dealers attend. US coins, foreign coins, even ancient coins. It's in White Plains, not far from the Metro-North train station. Easy access from the NYC area. They hold it three or four times a year.

There is nothing about this show on the Internet. No web site, no Facebook page, no listing on coinshows.com.

It's not a bad show, if you can find it.

Digital Historia Numorum currently offline; need advice

I took my digital copy of Barclay Head's Historia Numorum offline.

I started getting email from my provider that my web site was using large amounts of transfer. I looked at my server's logs, and found hundreds of requests for a valid URL, followed by / and some other part of the web site, like this:

/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/nc/bmc/nc/library/nc/library/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/bmc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/nc/library/nc/bmc/library/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/bmc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/library/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/library/library/nc/nc/bmc/bmc/peloponnesus/
… 1000s more …
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/library/nc/nc/nc/nc/bmc/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/library/nc/nc/nc/bmc/nc/bmc/peloponnesus/

I suspect that what is happening is some Bot is downloading a page, seeing my relative URLs to elsewhere on the site (e.g. ../bmc/index.html"), but then throwing away the .. and miscalculating the link as /bmc/index.html. But on my site, anything after a valid filename.html returns the same filename. The Bot thinks it is spidering a giant site but as actually getting the same page over and over.

Anyone know how to get Apache to 404 requests for / ? I have been running this site for ten years. If I can't get it working I will move the whole site to Amazon S3, but I'd rather not take that step this month.

Patents related to ISIS coin authentication

A few weeks ago we linked to information on the Royal Mint's ISIS technology.

A recent thread on StackExchange.com links to a patent on Metallic materials with embedded luminescent particles. The abstract:

Formation of an authentication element by deposition of a metal layer with embedded particles on a metal substrate, wherein the embedded particles are configured to convert energy from one wavelength to another. The embedded particles may be upconverters, downconverters, or phosphorescent phosphors, which can be detected and measured with analytical equipment when deposited in the metal layer. A metal substrate may include coinage.

Adam Davis writes

Essentially they are embedding inorganic fluorescent compounds into the metal plating on the coin. When a certain spectrum of light is shone on the coin, these particles absorb that energy and emit a different spectrum. So, depending on the particle they embed, the detector may be as simple as a UV LED and a light sensor at a specific wavelength.

By integrating different ratios of different particles they can differentiate between different coins, for instance.

Further, the patent explains that the plating process generally includes many layers of plating. They can add different mixes at each layer, and thus tell how well-used a coin is, by how many of the upper layers are removed. Aging the coin can be useful to determine when to take it out of circulation before these particles are entirely removed.

This technology can also be used in automotive parts, and technology equipment to defeat counterfeiting. For instance if you replace your iPhone screen with a counterfeit part, unless the counterfeiter goes to the trouble of matching the exact luminescent profile, Apple may be able to detect that you broke your phone's warranty, should Apple choose to use such technology to protect themselves from counterfeit products.

The technology doesn't include any sort of serial number or tracking component, so tracking coins through the system is unlikely, but perhaps other techniques they apply to the coins could be used for that purpose.

Although Mr. Davis doesn't think the coins could be tracked, imagining only measuring the ratios of different particles, it seems possible to scan the entire coin and compare it using a Scale Invarient Feature Transform. An encoding of the particles might be much larger than a serial number, but should easily fit in today's computers.