WW I Navy AISNE Bar

While going through a small collection of WWII Victory Medals I found a nice medal with a Navy AISNE bar. Navy bars are the ones with rope edges. My first question was why would the navy issue a bar for a land campaign? With a little research I found that the navy never issued such a bar! There are a lot of fake navy bars out there and this one is a classic with a pebbled field background. As many cops will tell you criminals are not usually the brightest of people. If some one goes to the trouble and expense to produce this bar wouldn’t you think they would do a bit of checking to make sure an original actually exists? Maybe they did or maybe like the counterfeiters of old who faced the death penalty if caught they were sly like a fox. Some old English coin counterfeiters altered the design of their product so that it was not an exact copy and therefore could claim that it was only a fantasy and not an actual fake. I am sure that whoever made these was not worried about a death penalty but maybe they had a mean streak which enjoyed the thought of some impulsive collector buying one of these “unknown” fantasy bars and then being too embarrassed to blow the whistle.