Recently (I think it was Thanksgiving), I was at my mother's house for a holiday and my mother came in and showed me a "coin." It was trying to be a 1795 silver dollar but it was a bad fake. It's the kind of thing that you take one look at and you know it isn't real. Didn't feel right and you know pretty much immediately that it isn't silver and the weight is off. I got to thinking about this again today after looking at yet another post wondering if a similar looking 1795 silver dollar was real.

it turned out she bought it off this website that I think I've talked about here before that is just full of these junk fakes. When you look at the listings on that site there's often a number of people commenting on how these things - fake Morgans, Trade Dollars, etc - are "great additions to my coin collection." It's nearly enough to make you want to scream.

She seemed rather proud of herself and said she "thought she did good." When I found out she'd paid $4 for it I just scoffed a little and told her she overpaid - at the prices on that site it shouldn't have cost her over $1. That price also pretty well confirmed that it couldn't even be real silver - just an ugly cheap fake.

The thing I can't wrap my head around is, this is the person that got me excited about coins when I was little by showing me grandpa's old silver dollars - real coins. I would have expected her to have a little more sense and awareness than that. I would have thought she'd have known a little better than to have bought something like that.

But... my mother isn't a collector. She seemingly just doesn't care if it's real or not. She just seems to think it's neat to look at. She doesn't share my distaste for the thing because she doesn't see it as a dangerous fake / fraud.

Fortunately, I think that thing just resides in piles of so much random junk and doesn't rate a spot to be stored in the same place as the actual coins.

I'm just going to really hope she doesn't keep buying the things and I don't find a pile of the junk to deal with when she passes - she's basically a hoarder as it is.