Counterfeiting: The World’s Second Oldest Profession

The “World’s Oldest Profession” has long been a well-known phrase, but the fact that counterfeiting has sometimes been called the world’s second oldest profession is not so well known. Yet the curse of counterfeiters has been with us almost since the dawn of coinage, about 600 B.C.

We tend to think of counterfeit coins as designed to defraud the public by passing them in the marketplace, but this is not quite the entire story. Counterfeits have been made for several reasons, although the earliest usage was to cheat merchants and ordinary citizens handling silver and gold coins.

It was not long after these first coins, struck of an alloy of gold and silver called electrum, that the dishonest began to ply their trade. At first, coins did not stray far from the mint that struck them and false coins could therefore be easily traced. Within a few decades, however, newer coins of nearly pure silver began to be carried on far-flung trading missions, and this meant opportunities for the dishonest.

The first counterfeits were made of copper with a thick silver plating so that the scratch test would not uncover the fraud. This led to merchants using chisels on the coins to actually split them nearly open to see if the core was the same as the surface. If not, of course, the merchant refused the coin and notified the