If you have the 'right' connections you can buy counterfeit pound coins, e.g. £60 - £80 buys you 100 of them. The price of the fakes varies, the ones that weigh

If you have the 'right' connections you can buy counterfeit pound coins, e.g. £60 - £80 buys you 100 of them. The price of the fakes varies, the ones that weigh the correct amount come at a premium as you can just put them in to vending machines and get useful stuff in return. The ones that don't work that way are obviously harder to spend, particularly if the colour is not quite as shiny as the proper ones. With those you really do run the risk of getting caught, particularly if you tried to pay for £50 of grocery shopping in pound coins that happened to be extra heavy, nearer black in colour than shiny gold and all from the same year... There is a whole other economy out there - think drugs - where fake coins are just another thing to sell/launder. People that buy drugs with a view to selling them in order to make the money needed to pay for their own habit are well placed to 'shift' fake coins and notes. They are not going to snitch either, this is because most people that buy drugs have just the one supplier, perhaps with someone else they can call on in emergency drought situations. To grass on their dealer is just not going to happen - they would lose their supply, possibly get nicked themselves and create lots of enemies in their scene. If fake coins get passed on through that same supply route then nobody is going to tell. The thing with the coins is that they only have to be passed off once from the 'black' economy to regular-commerce-land whereas the Royal Mint has to make coins that circulate for decades. For the counterfeiters it is easy to get the Queen's head stamped on there with some ridges around the edge, getting the weight and colour finish right has cost implications, hence this is not necessarily done to high-class forgery standards. I do wonder what the police would view as more serious - selling class 'A' drugs or laundering fake currency. I suspect the latter. Nonetheless, I hope that you now see how counterfeit coins have a route to market, why they don't actually have to be that good and how it is that so many exist without anyone being able to say where they come from.