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As a UK citizen, it stuns me that one-in-thirty pound coins is a fake because a) i can't imagine how it's possibly worth it b) out of the thousands of pound coi
by oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
As a UK citizen, it stuns me that one-in-thirty pound coins is a fake because a) i can't imagine how it's possibly worth it b) out of the thousands of pound coins i must have handled, I've never spotted a fake - they must be very good. Still, the new coin certainly looks nice!
- tspiteri 10y agoI've had machines refuse one pound coins, which then looked slightly off on closer inspection when comparing to other coins.
- gmac 10y agoI'm pretty sure I've seen some — rather crude detailing (especially around the edges), sometimes a slightly funny colour, and consistently rejected by vending machines.
- dx034 10y agoBut there are also a lot of £1 coins in circulation that are more than a decade old. I sometimes get coin bags from banks and even from those, some are rejected by vending machines and look crude.
- gmac 10y agoI wonder whether banks test every £1 coin that passes through their hands. Either way, being rejected by vending machines is probably neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for being a fake, but it's almost certainly correlated.
- pja 10y agoNah, the fakes are fairly obvious once you know what to look for. It doesn’t really matter so long as they circulate like other currency though. Money is weird.
- nicky0 10y agoYou could call it an unofficial form of Quantitive Easing.
- pjc50 10y agoSomalia spent years accepting fakes as real, because there was no "real" government: http://jpkoning.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/bringing-back-somali-shilling.html http://jpkoning.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/bringing-back-somali-... (Price fell to roughly the cost of production)
- OJFord 10y ago> It doesn’t really matter so long as they circulate like other currency though. Except that it's all profit for the criminals counterfeiting them.
- torrent-of-ions 10y agoYou've never had a vending machine or self-service checkout reject a pound coin before? I've held ones which are noticeable lighter and more worn than a real one. You've just never really paid attention.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoYes, but I've been conditioned into thinking a fault with the vending machine is much more likely than a counterfeit coin. Just the other day, I was using a vending machine that had a special panel on the front of it, with the specific purpose of rubbing your coins on it in the event that the machine didn't recognise them! I've definitely noticed worn coins before. Some of the current pound coins have been in circulation for 34 years, though, so I'm not surprised there'd be quite a range of wear.
- wolfgke 10y agoAt least for Euro coins (are these more difficult to fake?) it often happened to me that some vending machine accepted a coin only after multiple tries.
- avar 10y agoSame for Euro notes. It often takes multiple tries of trying to straighten out the bill before a vending machine will eat it.
- iandioch 10y agoWhat might be fun to try is to use a Euro 5c coin in a machine that expects 20p sterling coins. Living on the border with Northern Ireland, we figured out when I was young that the sweet machines in Northern shopping centres could be conned like that.
- UncleSlacky 10y agoIn the 80s I was able to use 5p coins (same size as the modern 10p) instead of quarters in arcade machines when I was on holiday in Florida.
- mootothemax 10y ago> I've never spotted a fake - they must be very good Some regions seem to get more than others, I used to see large numbers in the change I got in London. The quickest "tell" for me is the lettering on the edge. Some of it is shockingly poor quality and almost looks like someone took a soldering iron to draw it on. The next time a machine rejects one of your pound coins, take another look at it, there's a good chance it's fake. EDIT: Here's the first page I found looking for example images: http://www.larkinweb.co.uk/miscellany/counterfeit_one_pound_coins.html http://www.larkinweb.co.uk/miscellany/counterfeit_one_pound_... To my eye they look really shonky. Edit II: A couple more examples: http://www.cryst.co.uk/category/fake-pound-coins/ http://www.cryst.co.uk/category/fake-pound-coins/ http://www.employees.org/~tw/quids/quids.html http://www.employees.org/~tw/quids/quids.html FinalEditIPromiseNoReally: Check out this stack, they're almost comically bad: http://blog.alism.com/wp-content/2006/08/coinstack.jpg http://blog.alism.com/wp-content/2006/08/coinstack.jpg (found on this blog: http://blog.alism.com/fake-one-pound-coins-part-three/ http://blog.alism.com/fake-one-pound-coins-part-three/)
- coroxout 10y agoInteresting. Thanks for the links. I have indeed had some pound coins which were tatty round the edges and had to be pushed through a self-service checkout several times or wouldn't even go through at all. I still hadn't realised they might be fake, though. I have noticed that a lot of old 10p coins are noticeably a lot thinner (presumably worn down rather than starting out thinner) than new ones. Is this as it should be or should I start looking at these with suspicion too?
- mootothemax 10y ago>I still hadn't realised they might be fake, though. Yeah, I was the same until a machine failed and a colleague said that the coin might be fake. There is something rather delicious in the fact that we're so used to machines and computers failing that the idea the coin could be wrong never entered our heads!
- lostlogin 10y ago
- DonaldFisk 10y agoAs it's illegal to knowingly pay for anything with forged currency, I deliberately never check too carefully, and assume any coins rejected by vending machines must simply be worn.
- kw71 10y agoIs there any insight into who might be making the fakes and with what tools?
- DanBC 10y agoThey use coins from South Africa which are made from the same planchets. They put those into a hydraulic press with hardened steel dies.
- davweb 10y agoThere's a page on the site telling you how to spot counterfeits. http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-pound-coins http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
- keybits 10y agoI clicked that link and was told 'You are in a queue... You will be redirected to our website as soon as possible. There are 16 people ahead of you'. It was like being on hold for call centre! Screenshot: https://s8.postimg.org/6yp8lcs51/Untitled.png https://s8.postimg.org/6yp8lcs51/Untitled.png
- leoedin 10y agoPerhaps its because they often release unique/collectable coins for sale, and so a simple cache wouldn't work. It seems odd to apply it to a static page as well as the shop though.
- Theodores 10y agoIf you know the 'wrong' people you can buy £100 of pound coins for £40 (if they don't work in vending machines) or ~£80 (if they do work in vending machines). This is a thing in black market channels, so, for the junkie with nothing in life except where the next high is coming from, you can imagine that they can spend all day passing off these coins to get legitimate cash back, for that next high and for that next batch of counterfeit coins to pass off.
- taway_1212 10y agoI was cheated in the most crude way in London once - gentlemen selling African street food gave me (in my change, amongst other coins) a coin that looks and feels very much like a British pound, but is Ugandian (IIRC) and has some kind of ostrich-like bird's head on it instead of the Queen's.
- kintamanimatt 10y agoThat could have been a mistake. Some coins from New Zealand, for example, look a lot like British currency.
- ptaipale 10y agoLikewise for the euro: the Thailand 10 baht coin (worth about 27 cents) is quite similar to 2 euro coin, similar enough that you actually have to look carefully to notice. Each euro country mints their own coins with different insignia, so people are used to 2 euro coins that what whatever figurehead.
- r00fus 10y agoThat always piqued my interest as to how more easier Euro coins were to counterfeit given the numerous variations on coinheads.
- ptaipale 10y agoYes, compared to most of the previous national currencies; in the U.S. there also seem to be a number of variations of coin heads (for quarters at least). The coins in U.S. are smaller value so it does not matter as much. The 1 and 2 euro coins are dual metal though, making the counterfeiting much less lucrative. The Finnish 10 mark coins also used to be dual metal; so I think was the French 10 franc coin; I don't recall if others had much security against counterfeiting.
- BattyMilk 10y agoYeah. I got a NZ$1 in my change the other day. Didn't bat an eyelid. Time for a trip to NZ I guess
- galuggus 10y agoI was told that Hackney has the greatest concentration of fake pound coins.(no source on that) Have received many in my time. Machines don't like them They seem to be not quite straight.
- Fifer82 10y agoAs a student a dude in Liverpool was selling 50 for £10. A guy I knew lived on them for 3 years. His life revolved around 99p stuff.
- scholia 10y agoWhy didn't the dude just spend them himself? Too many fakes for that to be a viable option?
- djhworld 10y agoToo many fakes and risk of merchants tipping you off to the police I guess. If you become known as the guy who keeps giving dud coins, you're probably going to raise some suspicions. Probably easier to disperse the coins and hopefully not let them be traced back to you
- scholia 10y agoGood points ;-)
- MattBearman 10y agoI briefly worked in an arcade a few years back, so was changing a lot of £1 coins. 1 in 30 sounds about right, it was amazing how many fakes we'd see. Like others have said, the lettering around the edge is always the biggest clue, but also the head and tails stampings will sometimes be off centre, and misaligned to each other. The fake ones also make the 'wrong' noise when you drop them on a hard surface. It's hard to describe, but really noticeable if you compare it to a real coin.
- Angostura 10y agoWhat was the process when you found one? Report it in some way, or hope the bank didn't notice?
- MattBearman 10y agoHonestly I don't know, above my pay grade :) I just reported it to the boss
- gadders 10y agoI've spotted a few. They feel "light".
- nebabyte 10y ago> i can't imagine how it's possibly worth it Let's say you're one of three (or five) major creators/distributors of said coin. a third (or fifth, or whatever) of a thirtieth of all the pound coins in circulation doesn't seem worth it to you? > As of March 2014 there were an estimated 1,553 million £1 coins in circulation A fifth of that would be ~311 million pounds. Let's say you're one of fifty or 500 counterfeiting rings, that's still £31 or £3.1 million. Even if the process for counterfeiting cost a million pounds to acquire (probably much less), it'd still be £1M pure profit. The numbers for both cost and slice of the pie probably scale down to a bunch of small-time counterfeiters, but the margin is definitely there.