NEWS: Fraud Claims Against WTC Commemorative Coin

New coins, reportedly minted from the silver found at Ground Zero of the WTC are being called a fraud by NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer is investigating the claims of the where the silver came from and states that this is a "shameless attempt to profit from a national tragedy."

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National Collector's Mint, based in Port Chester, N.Y. claims that the coins are legally authorized silver, Spitzer claims they aren't. It is reported that the silver coins are not "nearly pure silver", but they are silver plated. There has been a temporary halt on sales of the coin pending a civil suit.

Good to hear.
I posted a thread about these so called 'government issue' coins last month.

Freedom Tower coins?

This company is engaging in misleading practices and is also guilty of bad taste.

It makes me sad that there are groups out there that feel it is ok to profit from such a tragedy. Then again, it's always been that way all over the world, and will continue to be that way. All hail the all powerfull buck ($79 cents Canadian ;-)

We need a really big sack, and a really big bat...
put all the 'n-word'ian 419 scammers, the commemorative coin makers and the many other con-men that take advantage of our elderly. Put them in the sack and then beat the ever lovin %*#($*% out of them...

That is really awfull. what a horrible way to try and make money.

and it's 9-11 no less
how many coins could they actually make from the recovered silver (if any) anyway?

There was a lot of silver in the WTC, hundreds of millions of dollars worth.
I don't know how much they got but since the coins are just silver plate, they could make tons of these coins.

I thought that this was crap when I first saw the commercial. They got silver from not only a crime scene, but a national memorial site as well? Sure, pal, sure.

Keep in mind that mixed in with the rubble are human remains. Many folks have silver fillings these days and some of that silver could have found it's way into these coins. Assuming that it's WTC silver.

Disgusting.

That's very doubful Chaosrain.

This silver was from the vaults used by the Bank of Nova Scotia.

It was the world trade center, they kept money from all sorts of sources there.

Right, and the silver kept their was owned by banks, corporations, etc. You think they just said, oh well, let whoever have it and do what they want with it.

I don't think so.

As a former numismatist, I can say that, as far as I could tell the ad was a little misleading, but was factually accruate, at least the ones I have seen. They claimed that the coins were 'layered" with .999 fine silver that was found beneath the WTC site. There is nothing inherently wrong with a nation or territory issuing a coin commorating anything and the WTC is as good a thing to commorate as I can think of. I never got the impression that the coins were being sold as US legal tender because the ad clearly states that the coins are issued by the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory.

In order to be called a coin an item must be legal tender, otherwise it is more correctly called a medal or medallion. The issue will boil down to whether or not the Marinas have the authority to issue any currency. If they do have such authority, I don't think there is a case.

By the way, such coinage has very little collector value, but ads like this have been around as long as I can remember and there is no law against selling coinage even if it will eventually be worth nothing but the face value. Such is the nature of numismatic speculation.

Grady, the US mint says they don't have the authority to mint their own coins.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I think they altered their ads recently to show they are from Northern Mariana Islands. I don't remember seeing it on the first commercial I saw, except on the engraving on the edge of the coin.

I guess that settles it. If the items are not legal tender then they can in no sense be considered coins and selling them as such would be fraudulent, in my humble opinion.

No, but this company that is selling the coins may have kept some of their profits as silver there, or, easily enough, they may have purchased the silver as a commodity from the people who kept it there for sale.