UKH

Has anyone ever found a fake £1 coin? I'm talking the one's in circulation now. 

About 3% of the old £1 coins were fakes and there are lots of fakes of the current £2 piece in circulation but I have never come across a fake of the current £1 coin. 

The £1 fakes were easy to spot 

I remember one shop owner getting cross when I refused a few in my change.

I haven't noticed any counterfeit new £1 or £2 though, they must be good. Is there a way to identify them?

Does anyone ever buy the royal mint coins? My Daughters started collecting after the Peter Rabbit 50ps came out.

I have a collection of old £1 fakes. There were loads about but as I mentioned I have never seen a new £1 fake.

 There are a few things on the £2 coin which stand out if it's a fake. The inner silver disc is often not flush with the gold outer and it should have raised dots on its outer border. These things are often missing in fakes. The designers initials which should be underneath the portrait are often missing too.

 On the reverse there are little cog wheels showing tiny teeth on  some designs of the real £2. These are just crude circles on many fakes.

 Apparently most fake £2's are made in China.

I imagine it would cost more than £1 to make a passable fake £1 coin

You could fake 10p coins by filing off the corners of a 50p coin.

They don't tend to be made, it tends to be other coins being repurposed. We regularly used to find Swaziland Lilangenis in our vending machines. They passed for £1 coins at the time but were worth about 12p as I recall. Obviously needs to be a pretty big operation to make much money on that!

Is that from Viz Top Tips?

You can fake one pound notes by painting five pound notes green. 

Assumed that. I saw loads when I was a teenager in Hull (30 years ago). A mate I knew from school had stacks of them and would use them in bars and clubs. I guess in early 90s Hull £1 went a lot further than it does today. 

I've lived in France for tens years and never use cash anywhere if I can help it so would easily get suckered in to fake money in the UK if I used it. I've no idea what it's meant to look or feel like now. 

Not if you are doing a lot at once.

I remember at school it had been worked out that the foil from chocolate pennies could be used to uprate the value of coins in one of the vending machines. I think it was 10p to 50p, but it sometimes confused the machine and you got about £2. It was a surprisingly long time before they took that machine out of commission.

At one of my first workplaces, they had a card system for the canteen, which occasionally gave you £20 when you tried to load on a fiver. It was eventually worked out that it was a bank of Scotland fiver, castle side up and one particular end first that did it, and lunch became very cheap for those in the know.

A few years ago there was a large scale scam involving the ticket machines at tube stations. Someone had worked out that you could upgrade the value of a coin by sticking foil to it. They'd put a load in, cancel the purchase and get different (real) coins back. It cost TFL a fortune and they blocked that particular coin until they could upgrade the machines.

In these days of austerity, that is an excellent tip.

Worthy of putting in Viz.

Also on the subject of coinage. Where are all the Alphabet 10 pences? I work with cash all the time but never see any of these!

Presumable, if you're going to go to the trouble of making a fake coin, why would you make a £1 coin when you could, for marginally more materials, make one worth twice as much? 

Heard that one at school - long before VIz

I often got offered change for a fiver when using a pound note (RBS) - long after they stopped printing them in England.   Yes I did point out the errors.

Particularly if the £1 coin is supposed to be forgery proof. But human nature being what it is I bet some master forger has tried to fake the new £1 because of the challenge.

My memory of the vending machine at school was that it had a design flaw - if you put your 2.5 new pence (6 denarii) coin in you then got a bar of chocolate by pulling out the now released drawer.  If you did not quite push the drawer back in so it engaged the locking mechanism then the next bar would drop down and you could pull the drawer out again - like the fabled trick to make a SLR fire multiple shots.

This coincided with the time that it was dark till after nine in the winter because they decided not to change the clocks so it could be done under cover of darkness before lessons began.  Useful survival tactics in Stalag Luft ??? where the food was terrible and there was no escape home at night or weekends