A Fake Foy Bag
Well it was bound to happen but it still doesn't make us happy that it has, fake Foy Bags have started appearing on Ebay and are being promoted on coin forums around the internet. Fake Centennial Florins have been around for a while but these fake bags are the first that we are aware of. Even more concerning is that the bag is a 'replica' of a Perth Foy Bag, the scarcer and more valuable of the two varieties of bag.
The fake bag is very easy to pick and was probably made by scanning a real bag and overprinting a commercial paper envelope with a colour laser printer or similar. Note that the text on the envelope "of which a limited issue was" is partially missing, probably due to the original bag having a fold at this point and the text being worn off. It's impossible to tell anything about the size of the envelope but certainly the location of the text on the envelope is completely different to that on the real bag too. This suggests that the manufacturer has probably just used a commercial off the shelf blank envelope of the wrong size rather than going to the trouble of getting envelopes of the right size made.
The most concerning aspect of these fakes are that Foy and Gibson are no longer in existence to protect their copyright on such fake items so we imagine the manufacturer can make them with relative impunity. Another worrying aspect is that the fakes are not marked as such. Our concerns would be allayed if "COPY" or "REPLICA" was printed somewhere on the bag to make it clear it was not the real deal. The final concern is that while the manufacturer of these fakes might have (reasonably) good intentions when making these bags it's just a matter of time before someone with baser instincts applies some artificial wear to one of these fakes and tries to pass it off as the real deal. A troubling situation for any upstanding Australian coin collector.
Real Melbourne and Perth Foy Bags
Posted by mnemtsas at August 6, 2011 10:18 AM
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