I posted this on another forum so to save time I will just paste my post here , just wanted to give a heads up , Scary stuff! Where to start? at first I thought maybe a die variety, since is a very good quality fake but there is just too much wrong with this. Two signs of plating are the dark spots at about 4oclock on the snake side and sort of bubbling on the surface below the Chinese characters, also small black spots when looking with a 10x loop. The end of the snakes tail is also wrong and the surrounding pattern, also where the snakes body crosses there is 4 diamonds connected where as the real one has only 3 connected , the texture is also slightly off and no sheen on the frosted areas which is common on other fakes I have seen , on the other side the texture is also off and the stars are much more rounded and other differences. Also the 10 has a slightly raised surface to a small point with texture as if the die was created with a cnc mill (hard to explain unless you do cnc milling like me) where as the real one is flat. I could go on and on but I hope this helps . I am also not sure if the boxes and COA are fake or not i will have to compare them when I get time but something does not look right. I think this type of counterfeit is especially scary because it is such high quality and I assume many people do not look very closely. I am in the process of trying to get a refund right now and as soon as I get the refund i may open up the capsule to get a better photo and may share the seller depending on how cooperative they are . I will say it is from an ebay UK seller saying they are based in Hong Kong and the coin shipped from Beijing , I would also add they were selling the 2012 Wutai mountain gold 1/10 and silver 2 oz coin set which I would assume at this point is also fake , they had low feedback mostly from selling cheap (under a dollar ) photos , and it seems these are the only coins they were selling I took a gamble because it finished really cheap , of course I usually only buy this stuff from reputable dealers I have dealt with in the past or from the USA graded, but i am glad to be able to share this. I would like to hear if anyone else has either one of these snake or the wutai mountain counterfeits . this kind of thing is very damaging to the MCC community and especially new collectors , which this is exactly the type of thing that drives people away from collecting Chinese coins.
I just compared the boxes and COA from an authentic coin and the fake mentioned here and sure enough they are all different very very similar, but different just like the coins , these bastards are getting very clever .Hopefully they never get clever enough but these are high quality .
Here is a picture of the authentic snake , I know these are bad pictures , sorry it is the best I can do right now.
THANK YOU for posting this info. I knew there were fakes out there as some online sellers in Japan who normally list fake pandas had modern lunars listed ... with not that detailed pictures ... P.S. once I won rabbit, than realized it was fake ... until I told the seller that I report the money forgery to police he didn't want to send my money back ... They surely deserve slap in the face, SOB
A Fake rabbit? was it the 2011 do you have any pictures? We also have to be careful not to get to paranoid as most are legit coins but some of these modern fakes are very close.
Thanks silverstar! also one dead easy giveaway ,the real snakes do not come mint wrapped ,no double wrap ,I graded 10 of each(snakes) and none of the recent lunar,s colored ,scallop , round or fans come in OMP thanks again silverstar
Yep Good point , and although some legit coins could be sealed later such as a well known Chinese seller does (for preservation possibly ) all the sealed pouch coins I have seen with this type of round corner seal seem to be fake.
