Having gotten a very large tax refund. I decided to spend some of it on a quickie trip to Europe, and on my last day I was in London. I was looking through my change and one thing I noticed is that each year, they change the reverse of the £1 coin. I would have taken them all, but I needed other things like food and tube tickets and the like. Two things I kept were 1991 and 1992 coins that had the exact same reverse, an english thistle or something. They weren't in very good condition (actually, they were, technically, but barely, you get the picture) and when I got back home to the states I gave them a good look and checked an old catalogue (new ones cost about sixty bucks or something like that) and discovered that I was right, the 1991 coin had the wrong reverse! I had found a very rare mule!!!! This could pay for the entire trip!!!! Or so I thought. I did some research on the internet and discovered that as much as a quarter of the pound coins out there are counterfeit. So the chances are, that I got one. Now exactly why people would go to all that trouble to counterfeit a coin that's only worth a pound is beyond me. Sure people use tiny tools to add or subtract mint marks or dates in order to make some junk worth thousands, but minting an entire run of coins? I mean that the investment would be far higher than the potential profit so why do it. This is not like making phony c-notes or €200s, where you can make passable fakes cheaply. These are coins, for crying out loud! These aren't gold or silver, but circulating coins with the buying power of little more than a dollar, and with inflation there, little more than loose change. Has anyone out there come across anything like that?
I remember watching a (fictitious) story quite a long time ago about a little old man who was counterfeiting dollar bills. The counterfeit bills were actually pretty good. When he was finally caught, he was asked why he didn't make counterfeits of larger denominations, and he said that he had been passing the dollar bills for years because nobody ever gave it any thought that someone would try to pass a fake dollar bill. Chris
Chris has it right. Most people in Britain would not examine coins closely. It's worth while for fakers to produce thousands of these at a fraction of the value of the coin. I used to come across them fairly regularly but they tended to be rather crude. Perhaps these criminals are using better equipment these days. Did you hear the one about the stupid criminal who was filing down fifty pence pieces in order to pass them off as 10p?
While you may well have got one, I don't think the 25 percent figure is right. There should be a decimal point between the two figures. "The Royal Mint takes counterfeiting extremely seriously and undertakes regular surveys to establish the incidence of £1 counterfeit coins. A survey in 2009 indicated a counterfeit rate of around 2.5% across the UK." http://www.royalmint.com/Corporate/media/news_05-01-2010.aspx http://www.royalmint.com/Corporate/facts/CounterfeitPoundCoins.aspx And yes, the higher the denomination, the more checks will be involved. In Euroland for example hardly anybody uses €200 or €500 notes, so if you want to spend one, many places will refuse to accept it - and if they take it, the note will certainly be tested. €50 and €100 notes are usually checked too. So the "high" value coins and the small paper denominations mean less profit for counterfeiters, but people have a better chance of using them as means of payment ... Christian
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]That was a really obscure movie... Mr. 880, released in 1950. Not wholly fictitious but based on a true story. And the notes were not that good, but because they were $1, they were not heavily scrutinized. I only saw it once on TV, probably fifty years ago.[/FONT] [FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]“Mister 880” (1950), tells the story of an elderly counterfeiter who not only was no artist but in fact provoked a manhunt “that exceeded in intensity and scope any other manhunt in the chronicles of ­counterfeiting” precisely because his ineptitude was so bewildering:[/FONT] [FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]“The first counterfeit bill he passed on his fellow citizens, in 1938, was a very bad copy of a one-dollar bill. When his career as a counterfeiter came to an end, in 1948, he was still turning out the same crude dollar bills from the same kind of inferior plates, on the same hand-driven printing press in the same corner of the same kitchen of the same top-floor tenement flat, and he never turned out more counterfeit dollars than he needed to support his dog and himself.”[/FONT] Read about it here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042742/
i always thought making counterfeit $1's was a better idea then bigger bills. back then it would have been easier. now you would have to hand a stack of them over for dog food. the cashier would probably notice, because of all the paper being wrong.
Less chance of getting caught, but if they get caught, more counts of counterfeitting? Is every fake found counted as one charge?
