counterfeit £1 coins

according to the royal mint there may be as many as 70 million counterfeit £1 coins in circulation in the UK, the easiest way to spot them is to scratch the coin with your fingernail and if it leaves an impression then it is a fake, look at the edge lettering, on the majority of fakes it is out of line and sometimes doen't match the coin reverse.



news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7628137.stm

 

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It's a few years since I used pound coins in circulation but when I did I used to come across the occasional fake. They were all fairly crude and one could spot them a mile away (so to speak). I wonder if the fakers have improved their production methods in the last few years.

 

I heard about this. And Thaivic is right I was also told they are easy to spot

 

Most have been easy to spot, the problem is hey are becoming more and more common. I remember back when he first stories about them appeared years ago they were saying something like 1 out of every two hundred cons was fake. Today it is suppose to be something like one out of every 36 coins is fake. or something like six times as many fake coins than about ten years ago.

 

just looked in my pocket and guess what theres a fake £1

 

Can you post a scan? What are the diagnostics?

 

from a pic it would just look like a normall £1 but when you have 2 coins in ya hand a real and a fake they do stand out

 

How do you tell? Weight? Material?

The fakes I've come across in other coins have a different luster, and even the best usually have obviously crude copies of some imagery. I'm just curious about how the fake £1's stand out.

 

mainly the quality of the coin the fakes are good but most people can notice them also the 2 sides when you spin them in ur finger the back and the front of the coin will be out of line

 

I remember talking about a fake I found last summer. I sold it at the ANA show later on for a tiny sum.

 

might be worth holding on to the fakes i find then i did hear that you are supposed to hand them in to the police to get them out of circulation but they dont give you a pound back lol so stuff that lol

 

i left one in my cottage in scotland, it is extremely crude and made of lead dipped in something to make it look like the real thing. the shop keeper thought i was crazy when i offered him a pound for it, to add to my collection of fake and fantasy coins...

 

I will have to check my pound coins for fakes now. LOL. I have a fake 2-franc coin from Switzerland (obvious cast copy with no edge reeding), a fake 1947 Canadian 25c, and a contemporary counterfeit 1861 US 3-cent piece. Maybe I can add some British fakes to my collection?

 

best fake i ever found was a 1913 half soveriegn, it was in a batch of farthings i bought about 12 years ago, it was in copper and the plating had worn off. i can imagine that to the untraied ey it could have looked genuine.

 

the fake £1 coins are so commen i see them literly every day. bus drivers in my area have been trained to spot them in my area because they cost the bus companies so much money

 

I used to work on the checkouts at a Sainsbury's supermarket and I used to refuse fake pound coins every day...much to the annoyance of the customers. When they would protest I used to say, 'knowing it's a fake it would be against the law for me to receive it as payment and for me to later pass it on to someone else'.

I can spot a fake pound coin easily, even with only a fleeting glance.

 

I'd love to have one! During my visit to the UK in 2010 I checked all my change but cannot find (or maybe just cannot spot) a fake one.

 

One easy way to spot the 'better made' ones is to look for mismatched obverses and reverses. The clowns that forge them are often so stupid to put a reverse for one year paired with an obverse for another! For example, an oak tree (1987/92) with an obverse for a year other than 1987/92.

The poorly made ones do indeed stand out.

As another poster said, the ratio is about 1 in every 36 £1 coins circulating are fake. According to a report I read, if it gets a lot worse, the whole denomination may need to be re-issued.

 

A good article by the Royal Mint is available from the link below:

http://www.royalmint.com/Corporate/facts/CounterfeitPoundCoins.aspx

There is a link off it that shows each £1 coin issued along with the correct reverse/obverse pairing, along with the correct edge inscription.

 

A quick question about these counterfeits: There are several reverse designs of the pound coins. Are there any in particular that are being counterfeited, or does this counterfeiting scourge cover the entire spectrum of circulating pounds?