Today the collector has to worry about the flood of counterfeits coming out of mainland China and openly advertised on Facebook and other internet venues. The government, despite numerous complaints, has done nothing to stop this nefarious practice. It is perhaps worth noting as well that the post office is not immune: Forever stamps are also widely counterfeited and sold in the same places.
This do-nothing approach to a serious problem was not always the case. In earlier times, the authorities took prompt action when notified of a problem.
In the 1950s, collectors awoke to the fact that a New Jersey mechanical engineer, Francis Henning, had been counterfeiting nickels on a large scale. The banks, because he pretended to be a vending-machine operator, accepted tens of thousands of his “coins” without asking any questions. It took the sharp eyes of a numismatist to discover that the counterfeiter had forgotten to put the special large mintmarks over the dome for his 1944 war-time date. But counterfeiting in the United States is far from new, as we see by the following discussion.
Mint Director Robert M. Patterson received some very disturbing news in the late fall of 1849. He was informed that certain persons in New York City were making their own cent coins, in direct competition with the Philadelphia Mint. Mint officials were naturally very upset because a considerable portion of their operating budget derived from profits made on the copper coinage.
