Just as I was going thru some email alerts this one caught my eye enough so to follow-up (see below).  While it's not autographs perse a number of dealers here collect artifacts of all sorts...

One had to look closely to see that these antique silver dollars were fake.

An unknown man sold 120 phony coins in return for $2,000 at The Cash Exchange, a pawn shop on Thompson Road, on Oct. 2, according to Webster Police Detective James T. Hoover.

The detective, who has been collecting coins since he was a kid, said he’s never seen a counterfeit coin operation.

“Who would think that you would take the time and effort to counterfeit coins?” he said, adding it would require plates.

The coins had eight different dates spanning 1882 to 1928.

The detective said he is spreading the word so that pawn shops, jewelry stores and antiques dealers don’t get taken.

Already, the same person is suspected of pulling off similar crimes in Auburn, Springfield, Southbridge and other communities throughout New England, the detective said.

Southbridge Police Chief Daniel R. Charette said the man sold 76 counterfeit coins to the Silver Chief recently for about $1,400.

The suspect uses the name Juan Carlos Mendez when making the swap, Detective Hoover said.

He uses immigration cards and passports for identification. Once he used a green card, the detective said.

The man always uses the street number 224, and most times the address does not even exist, the detective said. In Webster he used the nonexistent 224 Day Lane.

The detective compared the bogus coins to a couple of real silver dollars he owns that are worth about $30 to $40 each. The sound was duller when the fakes were dropped on the table. They were plated and did not stick to a magnet.

In addition, the detail of the counterfeit and real coins’ outer rings were different, and each fake coin’s weight varied, he noted.

The pile contained 15 to 20 bogus coins from the 1900s. Another sign they were fake was that they all had similar wear marks, impossible for coins that were in circulation for 100 years, he said.

Detective Hoover said he found out about the local crime through an email from the New England State Police Information Network, a central database to which nearly all pawn shops must submit daily records.

“Come to find out, hundreds and hundreds of these coins have been pawned throughout New England,” he said.

“From what I’m being told they’re Chinese knockoffs,” the detective said.