Hello! I'm an archaeologist working on a late Islamic (18th-20th century) site in Ras al Khaimah, UAE. I'm currently working on cataloguing our coin collection. One of the most common coins we get is a 1/4 Omani anna from 1898. Today I found one which is substantially lighter than they usually are: standard weight is 5.7g, this one is only 3.8g. It is also a little thinner than usual (by about 0.5mm). I'm not a numismatist so excuse my ignorance, but I always imagined it is higher-value coins that get faked? Is it likely that I have a fake here?
I'd be ever so grateful for any help! This website has truly been a godsend so far, as most of the material I'm dealing with is too late to be covered by archaeological catalogues and books :)
High value coins are faked to sell to collectors. Common coins are counterfeited to spend as real coins.
While there's probably no way to know for sure your coin seems like it would have been a contemporary counterfeit. (Contemporary counterfeit are often collectables.)
Status gewijzigd naar Opgelost(MariaMagdalena, 27-apr-2020, 07:01)
Thank you, that's very helpful. I'm pretty sure this one is a fake then, the only (identifiable) one we have so far by the looks of it - rather exciting.
Citeer: "bjherbison"High value coins are faked to sell to collectors. Common coins are counterfeited to spend as real coins.
While there's probably no way to know for sure your coin seems like it would have been a contemporary counterfeit. (Contemporary counterfeit are often collectables.)
What if a mint worker was to sneak and make coins in his coin press, would that be considered counterfeit or error?
I have no idea how experts would classify it, but I suspect counterfeit. We usually don't know the production circumstances so it would probably be categorized by what it looked like.