20 Ancient Counterfeits That Prove Fake Goods Are Nothing New

A Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren was known for painting forgeries of 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s work. He would buy real 17th-century canvases and scrape off the paint. Then he applied a new mixture of pigment and bakelite, an early plastic resin, before baking the canvases to make them appear aged and cracked. His forgeries were able to withstand all the tests of the day. At one point, he even sold a forged Vermeer to the Nazi official Hermann Göring for 1.65 million guilders. Arrested after the war for selling Dutch heritage to the enemy, van Meegeren confessed to forgery in court to prove he wasn’t a traitor.

In 1496, the 21-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti carved a marble statue of a sleeping Cupid. He buried it in acidic earth to make the statue look like it had been unearthed from centuries underground. An art dealer, Baldassarre del Milanese, sold the Cupid to a cardinal in Rome for 200 ducats and gave Buonarroti 30. The cardinal found out the truth and asked for his money back, but the deception made Buonarroti known to a wealthy Roman banker, Jacopo Galli, who became his patron and eventually helped him get the commission for the Pietà.

William Chaloner was London’s biggest silver forger in the 1690s. He had the audacity to testify before Parliament that the Royal Mint itself was rife with corruption. When Isaac Newton became Warden of the Mint in 1696, he set up a spy ring of paid informers, went undercover to visit criminals in prison, and personally interrogated suspects. This was how Newton caught his man: through patient investigation and legwork, not through scientific genius. Chaloner was hanged at Tyburn in 1699.

Eugène Boban, a French antiquities dealer, began selling quartz skulls in the 1860s, presenting them as authentic Aztec or Mayan relics. He placed one with a Paris museum and sold another to Tiffany & Co., which later resold it to the British Museum. More than a century later, a study using electron microscopy found tool marks from 19th-century German equipment on the skulls. It also traced the quartz to Brazil or Madagascar, both of which are far from any Mesoamerican civilization.

The New York of the 1850s was a city of urban dairies that stood alongside grain distilleries. The dairymen fed their cows hot, leftover whiskey mash from the stills. This produced thin, bluish, diseased milk, from which dealers would skim off the natural cream and disguise the rest with plaster of Paris, chalk, and starch and then sell it to families. After an illustrated newspaper revealed the trade in 1858, public health officials estimated the practice killed about 8,000 infants each year. The public backlash led to New York’s first anti-adulteration milk law in 1862.

Between the 12th and 17th centuries, European apothecaries marketed ground “mummy powder” as an effective treatment for bruises, broken bones, and internal bleeding. The name came from the Arabic word mumiya, meaning natural asphalt, but was mistakenly believed to refer to bodies from ancient Egypt that had been embalmed. As authentic mummies became harder to find, merchants began producing their own, using executed criminals or victims of the plague. The bodies were filled with bitumen and resin and then pulverized into powder. Genuine and fake mummies circulated simultaneously in the same market.

Sometime between roughly 800 and 1100 CE, a Frankish workshop began stamping its top-of-the-line blades, forged from an unusually pure imported steel that was remarkably flexible and would not snap during combat, with an inlaid trademark, “+VLFBERHT+.” Competitors started mass-producing inferior copies using low-carbon iron laced with lots of slag, but stamped “+VLFBERH+T” on them in an attempt to pass them off as authentic. It took the efforts of one modern metallurgist, Dr. Alan Williams, to look at more than 170 surviving examples of these swords and distinguish the fakes from the real deal.

In the 17th century, Antonio Stradivari, a violin maker in Cremona, Italy, crafted violins that went on to fetch millions of dollars at auction. In the 19th century, workshops in Germany, France, and Austria produced these instruments en masse, complete with printed labels bearing the inscription “Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat,” a standard trade convention signaling that a violin was built in Stradivari’s style. Labels themselves were perfectly legal. The illegality began when dishonest merchants artificially aged the paper and wood and sold them off as authentic instruments made in Cremona.

The French invented oleomargarine out of rendered animal fat and vegetable oil, which was naturally white. In ensuing years, US salesmen dyed their own versions yellow and then sold them as “real” butter at a higher price. Aggrieved dairy farmers convinced Congress to levy a federal tax on dyed margarine in 1886, and states such as New Hampshire and Vermont passed legislation requiring that margarine be dyed pink, to distinguish it from butter. The Supreme Court eventually overturned the pink-margarine mandates, but the bans on yellow dye continued for many more years.

The French Revolutionary Government printed paper money called assignats, secured by land confiscated from the church. Between 1792 and 1796, the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger gave the go-ahead for a clandestine plot in which British paper mills and printing establishments produced highly realistic fake assignats. Ships operated by royalist sympathizers then secretly transported the fakes into France, where they were distributed to flood the currency. The counterfeiting hastened the demise of an already depreciating assignat. In 1796, France completely abandoned the assignat.

When it came to selling tea in Britain during the 1800s, sellers would add “smouch,” tea leaves that had already been steeped, or brew a mixture of inferior, cheaper tea leaves combined with tea from local trees treated with tannin. Some practitioners resorted to “facing,” using cheap tea leaves coated with copper carbonate, lead chromate or Prussian blue to simulate high-quality green tea. It was physician Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall who proved that tea sellers were engaging in these deceptive practices, and his tests prompted the passing of Britain’s Adulteration of Food Act in 1860.

Arthur Hill Hassall, the physician famous for revealing tea fraud, examined ground coffee adulterated with chicory root, sawdust burnt black, and roasted acorns throughout 19th-century Europe and America. Some merchants even pushed a mixture of chicory root, flour, and clay through a pipe into molds shaped like coffee beans, then roasted these with the genuine product in order to satisfy customers who wanted their coffee in bean form. One dealer used baked horse liver! Chicory eventually became a widely used coffee flavor, but molding it into fake beans was a fraud concealed from consumers.

Between 1740 and the 1790s, the Royal Mint virtually ceased issuing legal-tender copper halfpences and farthings, resulting in a shortage of small change throughout Britain. Birmingham-based metalworkers stepped in to fill the void, churning out large quantities of thin imitation coins that featured modified versions of the king’s profile to avoid charges of high treason. By the 1780s, Parliament believed that as much as half of the copper currency in use was forged. In 1797, the Crown commissioned Matthew Boulton’s Soho Mint to manufacture official coins embossed with anti-counterfeiting rims.

In the Middle Ages, pilgrimage was big business. Splinters of the True Cross, teeth of a saint, or even a vial of holy blood could draw hordes of visitors, donations, and tax breaks to churches around medieval Europe. Traveling peddlers, known as pardoners, sold everything from the bones of animals, including pig bones, to splinters of regular wood and even pig’s blood in an unregulated market. Both scholars Desiderius Erasmus and John Calvin pointed out that all the fragments of the True Cross in existence could fill a cargo ship.

Wine from Mount Falernus in the Campania region was Rome’s most famous luxury beverage, a high-alcohol, amber-colored wine that was prized for its dark color and oxidized taste. The wine’s popularity meant that it was often faked, with cheap wine mixed with pitch, chalk, resin, and herbs. Jars that were once filled with Falernian wine were refilled with cheap wine and given fake painted labels, claiming that the wine came from the right place. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote about this fraud, saying that Rome’s rich and powerful never really knew whether they were drinking the real thing or not.

The standard Athenian silver tetradrachm, bearing the image of the goddess Athena on one side and an owl on the other, was the main currency for trade throughout the Mediterranean during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Many counterfeiters made their own versions of these coins by wrapping a piece of copper core with silver foil then striking them with a die imitating the original, resulting in the subaerati, or sub-aeratus. A lawmaker named Nikophon created the Currency Law of 375 BCE. He installed dokimastai, or public coin testers, in the marketplaces. They had authority to mutilate and confiscate false coins, and return the genuine ones.

In the Roman world from around the 3rd century BCE through the 3rd century CE, counterfeiters made silver coins by taking bronze or copper blanks and covering them with silver foil. Using heat and specially made dies, they pressed designs on both sides of the coin to make it look like a legitimate denarius. The only way for merchants to detect the counterfeit was to use a chisel to make small cuts in the edge of the coin before using it for payment, allowing them to see the base metal inside.

Saffron was made by hand-harvesting delicate crocus flowers and commanded prices that rivaled precious metals throughout the Roman Empire. The ancient naturalist Pliny the Elder complained that no crop was subjected to more deceit: he reported that dishonest dealers dyed threads in lead-water or diluted real saffron with dried marigold petals, shredded wood, and powdered lead to make the spices weigh heavier. To counteract this cheating, buyers would check whether threads crackled between their fingers or burned their eyes when held close.

Galen of Pergamum was the personal physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. At that time, rich Romans believed in Theriac, a drug consisting of a mixture of many ingredients, including viper flesh and opium, and believed to be protective against poison. Galen wrote about rampant fraud in expensive imported drugs, where merchants replaced imported ingredients with cheap native plants, turpentine, or wax. Since the emperor consumed Theriac every day, Galen would check the ingredients personally and oversee their mixing within the imperial palace.

Lapis lazuli is a rare deep blue stone that had to be brought in from Badakhshan, a faraway area in what is now Afghanistan, and was therefore scarce and expensive in Bronze Age Egypt. Egyptian glassmakers developed a cobalt- and copper-based blue glass so perfect that cuneiform texts referred to it as “lapis lazuli from the kiln.” Lapis glass was genuinely appreciated for its status as a luxury technology, but unscrupulous merchants also passed off glass beads and amulets as naturally mined lapis. It may well be the world’s earliest documented case of fakes.

This content was created with the help of AI.