Henning Nickel

rginn · Sep 29, 2013

I found this about 40 years ago and the only reference I could find was one coin book I had listed it, 1944 no mint mark--counterfeit. So the other day I was reading an article about treasure tales in of all places, New Jersey, and all my questions were answered. In 1954 a guy named Francis Leroy Henning, who had been busted for counterfeit $5 bills, decided to counterfeit nickels so as not to attract too much attention. He would pose as a vending machine operator and take them in rolls to banks to swap for bills. Probably about 100,000 of them reached circulation and Henning dumped about 400,000 just before he was caught. The feds recovered about 14,000 of these. Not worth a whole lot but kinda cool. Sorry about the pic quality but I'm still figurin out my macro lens. You can get the idea though. The mint mark is missing and it has the looped R in 'pluribus' on the reverse. And hopefully the Secret Service doesn't decide to make an example of me for a fake nickel.

sagittarius98 · Sep 29, 2013

It's worth about $50, and is about 79.1% Copper, 20.5% Nickel, 0.4% Iron.

unclemac · Sep 30, 2013

thanks for the history lesson! very cool

SCDigginWithAK · Oct 3, 2013

Amazing coin!

baddbluff · Oct 4, 2013

Awesome find! I too read the same story a few times. Cool!

airplane15 · Oct 5, 2013

RGINN said:
I found this about 40 years ago and the only reference I could find was one coin book I had listed it, 1944 no mint mark--counterfeit. So the other day I was reading an article about treasure tales in of all places, New Jersey, and all my questions were answered. In 1954 a guy named Francis Leroy Henning, who had been busted for counterfeit $5 bills, decided to counterfeit nickels so as not to attract too much attention. He would pose as a vending machine operator and take them in rolls to banks to swap for bills. Probably about 100,000 of them reached circulation and Henning dumped about 400,000 just before he was caught. The feds recovered about 14,000 of these. Not worth a whole lot but kinda cool. Sorry about the pic quality but I'm still figurin out my macro lens. You can get the idea though. The mint mark is missing and it has the looped R in 'pluribus' on the reverse. And hopefully the Secret Service doesn't decide to make an example of me for a fake nickel.

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Awesome find great story too. Yeah they might confiscate that nickel to help pay for Obama care lol