I thought there is no other metal as dense as gold therefore the fake coin is either under/over weight or the size does not match....
Tungstens specific gravity is so close to gold that bars have been bored out then filled with tungsten. It's the one metal that will produce the closest results to being real as far as specif gravity testing goes.
XRF should catch these - they would have to be plated, which means they would momentarily test as .9999 AU, before probably dropping to .02 AU and .98 W as the test runs - generally 10 seconds or longer gives the best read. Most gold plating is 24K. Either way they wouldn't be able to apply a thick enough gold plating to fool XRF without a loss of minted detail from the underlying tungsten base coin. Still waiting to see one of these coins cut in half to reveal an authenticated tungsten interior. Tungsten would be an incredibly difficult metal to work with in terms of minting a fake tungsten coin for gold plating. Still of the opinion that gold plated tungsten coins are an internet beat-up, promulgated by one Chinese website offering to deliver them. Yet to see definitive proof of one. That photo on the Fisch website shows a fake coin - without cutting it or XRF testing it, how do they know it is tungsten and not some other regular base metal? Also - the information source has a conflict of interest in that they are selling a new device to test for these. They would have shown up in Australia by now from the likes of alibaba/eBay like the thousands of fake silver rounds & bars in circulation here. So far the only confirmed tungsten filled gold counterfeits have been 10oz and 1kg gold bars - the 10oz PAMP gold bars were done by wrapping a featureless, plain old flat tungsten bar in an outer pre-minted gold "wrapper", and the genuine 1kg bar was drilled out and tungsten rods inserted to scavenge maybe 500g of the kilogram - the bar was still half a kilo of gold or thereabouts. Neither involved minting tungsten or creating a tungsten base with any design.
There is something interesting about fake 1oz maple gold coin. Do fakes have micro "2013" on them and how it looks like?
Looks like you can still buy these in China... http://www.alibaba.com/product-deta...8961716.html?spm=a2700.7724838.35.1.RTDU1k&s= Scary.
When you look at both coins side-by-side, they look similar but not identical. I can see several differences in the two coins. Another reason that I normally only bought current year coins.
How convenient that the guys that found these "best" fakes are also SELLING A TOY THAT DETECTS THEM. If they were not selling the protection i may pay attention, but as it stands they are JUST SELLING THEIR PRODUCT. A wee bit like a armed gunman trying to sell you a bullet proof vest
Correct .. What was happening was that the shysters were drilling 5mm holes through the bars and then hammering a 5mm tungsten rod through the hole. Then they'd recap the ends with gold.
