A FAKE GOLD BUFFALO HOW TO SPOT IT and How We Know for Sure!

this is the one that kind of surprised me a little bit it's a gold a buffalo and nowhere on there does this thing say it's a copy anywhere hey what's up this is brian kuzmar from commercial rare coins and precious metals in lauderdale by the sea with that promised update i was going to give you on some items that are counterfeits copies and spurious type things that are meant to fool you this isn't the item i was talking about and i'll get to that in a moment here but here just to give you a few here's one of the oldest counterfeit type gold items where they actually took a nickel they're called racketeers nickels and they were and they made them in 1883 and let me kind of put that down see if i can give you a little better close-up shot of that right there there it is right there 1883 that's actually a nickel but before the nickel got out there people had confused that with a five dollar liberty head which i don't have a picture to show you but uh uh there's the back of it and if someone took the time to see there is no nickel it doesn't say five cents on there it says five so back in the day when this coin first came out uh people were taking them and gold plating them and passing them off as five dollar gold pieces because people didn't know any better anyway that's actually a real coin that's been gold uh a real nickel that's been gold-plated and it was passed off years ago uh as a real five dollar gold piece at the time and these today are known as racketeer nickels so type in racketeer nickel under your in in a google search or a duckduckgo search and you'll get a kind of cool story all about them anyway here's just a couple samples of some counterfeits we've gotten over the year uh continental dollars which if they're real they're worth thousands but they're they're quite often uh we see a lot of these earlier type coins that are copied and counterfeited uh that one's not real obviously then you've got your morgan dollars and the quality of the copies on the morgan dollars coming out of china is eve so much better uh more likely to fool you and uh let's take a look here the other side here uh in quick passing and a bunch of coins this might fool some people this is why you really need to take a closer look at the stuff uh but the coin is just totally wrong in every way so are these they're not even silver so they are getting that uh the fakes down pretty good as far as copying the silver and here's two items that are real actually here's one of the earlier fake chinese counterfeits that we see a lot of as well you see a lot of these at flea markets these have been out for 20 years now or something like that or more these better morgan dollars are more recent here again you know avoid buying off the internet unless you know the person real well or online avoid buying from people that aren't coin experts because you could end up with this kind of stuff which some customer did uh here's a deceptive uh thing right here uh they make this buffalo in a one ounce round if you take a look here says one ounce it says coffee down there it's not a real buffalo but it is one ounce of pure silver however the same company makes this version which if you don't look closely and you got a bunch of these buffaloes you assume and i'm gonna put these two side by side right here sorry about the uh camera moving around so much i got it zoomed in but i want to put these two side by side and let me zoom out here a little bit and i'm going to take that and if you notice one says one ounce fine silver over there and the other one doesn't say anything but you can be fooled and thinking both of these silver because they're almost the exact same size so actually i went through a big process there to show you just a couple items that we see quite frankly in our shop but this is the one that kind of surprised me a little bit it's a gold a buffalo and nowhere on there does this thing say it's a copy anywhere it's kind of a little deceptive but i'm going to set the camera down here and put this so i can show you a little bit closer here let's take a look here and turn that around and let me see if i can one second there and let me see if i can zoom in on that there's a sample that i'm i'm looking at and you know what this would fool some people i mean as soon as i i saw it i kind of knew it was wrong because the design was wrong the color's a little bit off uh but this could actually fool some people again the weight is way off on that let's take a look at that a little bit closer and again nowhere on here does it say copy unless i'm missing it fifty dollar one ounce 999 fine gold and uh there's a reverse of it anyways i'm going to take you take this coin and take it down to the machines downstairs and do a test on the xrf machine and also on my specific gravity machine so let's move over to there okay let's take these uh two coins and again here is the copy that we have which is dated 2011 as you see there and there's our real coin [Music] i'm going to take this coin right here which is the copy and i'm going to put this on the xr machine right here and close the lid there we're going to go over to this screen right here and the result should pop up on this now if the plating is heavy enough this will show up as 24 karat however the plating is not that heavy so it's reading through this thing will only read through a few microns so if it's a heavy plating it will read as 24 karat gold but it's looking like that the plating is very thin on this particular copy and it's coming in a very light light amount of gold and the rest of it as expected uh 73 uh uh copper and 25 nickel uh there is no gold or silver in this thing whatsoever so let's move along to the next one this is our real buffalo which i've got right here in my hand we're going to throw that on our xrf machine right here close the lid for safety purposes and uh i could pull the trigger from here or here but we'll pull the little trigger it's like a gun and as you can see the little red lights flank i don't know why they put the red light on there just to show you it's working and let's take a look here at what our results are going to be there you go 24 karat gold but as i said if that gold-plated buffalo that was underweight had been heavier plated it would have got the same reading so this 17 000 machine really doesn't do anything but tell you what's on the outside surface which for precious metals dealers is very important so i'm going to move along to the next test here which is going to be the specific gravity machine so i'm going to set that up and i'll be back in one second now that we've tested it on the xrf machine and we've got an outside reading on one of these that shows it's mostly nickel and copper with a light plating of gold and the other one is 24 karat gold according to the xr machine but again it doesn't tell us what's inside the item we're going to go over to the specific gravity machine and say that three times fast if you can and we're going to test that on there and first i'll test the real one right here that we've already done and actually let me zoom out a little bit so i get a better shot of that and i'm going to grab this and we're going to open up this tank now this specific gravity machine is very very delicate uh and it and it tells us what's inside the item as long as it's not hollow and has other type of items in it it's going to give us a good reading and i'm sorry about the glare of the light right there i'll try to move around here and as you notice we have to the temperature right there 18 degrees celsius we got to enter that because all the stuff is important when you're doing this so i'm going to put this on the top shelf which is going to be the dry weight this should come up as 31.15 31.16 uh it'll be just slightly hair off that's very accurate right there so we got 31.16 and what we're going to do is we're going to take that item we're going to pull it out of off the dry rack right there where we weighed it and as you can see i'm going to submerge this in the water down there and try not to make a mess like i did just there and we're going to go down here and we're going to hit this enter button one more time and what you're going to see is slowly calculating and it'll get down to that last little mark and it will tell us that it's 24 karat gold and voila it actually says 105 but 24 karat gold is uh what we got there so let's take this fake gold buffalo right here and uh let's put it into this specific gravity machine and see what comes up this will be the dry weight not submerged in water and what i'll do is i'll hit this let that settle down just a tad right there once that settles down we're going to hit that enter button and there we go so now we'll take the item out of here we will drop it inside the water tank part of it close that lid because a little bit of air moving in there can change your can change the carrot on it so let's hit enter and what we should be getting is low carrot no carrot on the fake and there we go coming down to two more and we should be right there and what i'm suspecting to see is low there you go gold low and more or less it means basically no gold it might be picking up a tiny bit but i don't think so so that's the definitive test this machine right here the xrf is a great machine for telling you what's on the surface but not what's inside the item and machines like this are very very important when you're buying selling gold if you're dealing with dealers that are not using this type of equipment and or don't have years and years of experience you probably shouldn't be buying off them because it's just too much money and an ounce of gold to make a mistake so that's my recommendation is i know who you're dealing with avoid buying online unless you're buying from the big online sellers and i still recommend sticking with your local dealers you're going to get a better deal and these guys been around for a while they're going to know what they're looking at so anyway let me move on from there and show you something else here okay let's do a little simple final test here that you folks can do by yourself at home now this only applies to coins like the american eagle right here that you see uh made by the us government they're 21.6 carat and 900 fine same as the u.s 20 gold piece same thing as a krugerrand same thing as british sovereigns and almost every type bullion coin that's been made for the last couple hundred years this is a standard fineness worldwide uh again 90 90 21.6 carat so what it does is it has 90 percent uh uh of this coin is gold and ten percent is copper to give it hardness and durability however this coin does as you saw in the earlier test oh no i didn't weigh this one i'm sorry this coin weighs more than an ounce uh to make up for the little bit of copper they put in it so there's exactly one ounce of pure gold in this coin right here and there is uh ten percent copper so again one ounce of gold ten percent so it weighs 1.1 percent uh or 1.1 ounces or something like that so a little bit over uh one ounce and the unique thing about this type of gold and again this is a test you can do at home is you can take a crew brand like you can a maple leaf and this is the hardest part is actually balancing it on your finger right here so let me see if i can get this and i'm going to take my lucky bull and bear uh coin here that we use for the coin toss on our daily things and then or our my daily uh updates or we haven't used in a while but i'm going to use this to get a ring so i'm going to be quiet here let's see if i can get that for you ready up dropped it dropped it and let me see oh you hear that nice ring like a bell that's what all if you took 1 000 american eagles like this and you put them all next to your ear and you bounced each one on your finger every one will sound alike so it has that nice bell-like ring again you know a good reason if you've got something you suspect that's a crew grant or eagle and you think it might be fake try the simple ring test if it sounds like a dull thud and it doesn't sound like the rest of your eagles or krugerrands you may have an issue however that doesn't work on all gold coins for example here's a buffalo american buffalo which is pure gold there's no alloy in this alloy and it weighs exactly one ounce so uh let's listen to what this thing rings like and let me see like i said balancing is the hardest part i was never good at this part of bouncing but let's hit it with my lucky coin kind of a whole different letty ring if you've noticed on uh on the real one not not that uh a bell-like ring but kind of a more like a dull thud and maple leafs are even more dull sounding so let me hit that one more time there you go a totally different ring so if you take your your uh gold buffaloes and you grab all your gold buffaloes and uh uh start comparing them with the way they sound you will notice that if you tap it the same way it'll sound the same way however it's not as clear as the eagle that we were just showing here so anyway i just wanted to give you that little kind of quick tip and if you don't quite get it i can't help you with the balancing part because i can't even help myself but if you don't quite get it come by here and i'll show you some other products and and how they ring but you know there's a good test that doesn't require any expensive equipment or anything else so anyways listen i appreciate you watching our little pro tip videos here and i hope you have yourself a great day check out my other videos as well and the daily updates mondays through fridays that we do on precious metals and give our opinions and other things and don't forget to check out our other pro tips thanks for watching this is brian kuzmar with commercial rare coins and precious metals in sunny lauderdale by the sea hope you enjoyed this little pro tip have a nice day you

Channel: Commercial Rare Coins & Precious Metals

Views: 17,580

Rating: 4.745223 out of 5

Keywords: gold, silver, platinum, coins, coinscollection, coinsforsale, coinshop, coinshops, metals, preciousmetals, antique, antiques, antiqueshop, antiquejewelry, jewelry, gifts, silvereagles, silverpandas, silverbars, silverbar, goldeagles, bullion, bullionrounds, goldbullion, fortlauderdale, fortlauderdalebeach, lauderdalebythesea, buylocal, buysell, buyandsell, buyselltrade, papermoney

Id: ldiS2nRPjtk

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020