Coins

Altering U.S. Coins Is Illegal - Coin Scamming Suspect Caught

The Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS), along with the police, took down an alleged coin scammer when the third-party coin grader found genuine coins that had been cut in half, purported as rare coins, and then placed into tampered coin slabs.

This goes to show 2 things:

• Trying to pass altered common coins as rare is illegal (though you probably already knew that!)
   
• Third-party grading companies (like PCGS) really know their stuff. They can detect suspicious coins that many novices and other numismatic civilians would not.

Slabbed coins, graded coins, and encapsulated coins -- which all generally refer to the same type of coin -- is the kind of coin that has been graded and authenticated by a third-party company, like PCGS.

A third-party company is an independent body which examines coins (for a fee). As long as the coin is genuine (and, for most graders, not damaged), the coin will be inserted into a tamper-evident plastic holder.