A great resource for IDing fake coins- Aliexpress, taking fakes to a new level

[diggerdeeper]

I wanted to put this out there for discussion because it's a very real and serious issue : FAKE COINS
If any of you collect coins by purchase as well as MD'g for them, you should avail yourself of one free research tool- Aliexpress.
For those who have never heard of Aliexpress, this is a website for selling all sorts of cheap, foreign ( I will avoid using the "C" word) knock off stuff..including metal detectors.
What's interesting is, all the photos on the website show the coins as being marked "copy".
However, I'm not so sure the coins that are actually being sold are marked at all.
Now if you scan the pages of copies, you will note that some are pretty poor copies, or even fantasy designs.
But some are surprisingly accurate when compared to a known original.

One other really alarming thing I read about recently was, certain foreign makers are actually copying legitimate certified encapsulated coins like those from NGC !
The only way to know if that slabbed/certified coin you just bought is real is to check the serial number on their website.

I don't know if this website has a forum dedicated to fakes, but maybe it should ?
Thanks for reading this.
What say the community ?

 

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[diggerdeeper]

So here is an example of what I'm talking about... the two photos were pulled from the eBay listing,but as you can see the one photo was taken straight from the AliExpress site.. To be fair the seller did not advertise this coin as anything more than "silver plated" , leaving it up to the buyer to decide whether it is real or fake. But you have to admit, the coin looks very believable. Price on Aliexpress- $1.89-$3.00. Ebay price- $20.00

In the beginning I thought, it looks real and what are the odds that somebody would fake an oddball, relatively cheap coin like this ?
Long story short, this seller had more than one of these coins listed, so I asked them how many they had ?? I mean, how many could they possibly have of such an oddball coin ?? They replied they had like 20 of them and they could make me a good deal if I wanted more!
There was no way anybody could have more than a couple of coins like these and certainly not in identical condition. So that led me to start searching the internet, and boy, did I get my eyes opened.

 

[SeabeeRon]

Is Aliexpress the same thing as the Chinese "Amazon", Alibaba?

 

[diggerdeeper]

SeabeeRon...yeah pretty much.