by Lionel Bascom — August 18th, 2006 — No comments
They’re the color of gold, says the Daily News, but what looks like gold, and sounds like gold, is fodder for fools.
An outfit called the National Collector’s Mint of Port Chester, New York is hawking sets of commemorative coins colored to look like gold with silver looking inlays shaped like the Twin Towers. They are “made of 15 mg. of 24-kt gold and 15 mg. of .999 pure silver’ they claim were “miraculously recovered from a bank bault found under tons of debris at Ground Zero. They sell for $29.95. Another newspaper, the Journal News, had the metal analyzed and found the metal in these coins is worth about 32 cents.
These same hustlers were caught two years ago trying to sell Freedom Tower medallions as the real currency of the Northern Mariana Islands. The islands don’t have any currency of their own. They trade and use American money as legal tender. “And the supposedly pure silver in the coin - the same miraculously recovered silver - was hair-thin and worth about 1.4 cents,’ the News said. “State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office sued, and a judge fined the company $370,000. Spitzer’s investigation was unable to confirm whence the silver came.”
The new scheme is even more offensive, if that’s possible. This so-called mint is linking the coins to charities called Tuesday’s Children, the World Trade Center United Family Group, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the Families of Flight 93 National Memorial. The charities do exist, but are not run or operated by the makers of these almost worthless coins.