UKH

I like looking at forged coins and notes. It's an interest that has grown out of working with cash day in day out. I started to collect fake £1 coins before the new ones were introduced, looking for them as a way of making the working day more interesting. I have about 20 all subtly or not so subtly different from each other. Studying them I can see that some are obvious fakes with the silver coloured base metal showing where the gold has rubbed off. Others are poor casts with the blurred image of the Queen slightly off centre. The most surprising thing to me was that the very best forgeries all seemed to display the same 'school boy' error. The casting is perfect. Clear and precise on obverse and reverse, but the two sides don't line up! The top of the reverse should mirror the top of the obverse but there it is at 90 degrees to the head on the front. I suppose these coins all come from the same forger. But to go to all that trouble to create such a clear image just to get this detail wrong seems almost comical.

 I have never found a fake new £1 coin.

You get what you pay for

I've a few,... i wonder if they do it to recognize their own work later, 

I still have a couple of fivers from one of my dodgier customers

sadly havn't seen a fake new pound coin yet

A quick 'google' says that there have been no fake new £1 coins discovered yet but there are some with production errors. They say it is one of the most secure coins in the world regarding counterfeiting.

Regarding forged notes, I sold a washing machine a few months ago and the guy that came to collect tried to pay me in what I'm sure were fake £20 notes.

They were Northern Irish Danske Bank issued - long story, but I had the chance to measure them and they seemed to be the wrong size and didn't feel quite right.

In the end, I insisted on being paid in Sterling notes and he changed them. Still not sure if he was actually trying to scam me or he'd accepted them in payment from someone else and honestly didn't know - he seemed a decent enough chap.

I lead a project not too long ago where pound coins were the bane of my life. Ultimately the answer was to move to contactless payment and then with the pandemic, contactless only (irrespective of the fact that it's almost impossible to transmit the pathogen on coins/notes but whatever)

The coins themselves were a huge burden in terms of cash counting, safekeeping until they could be banked (which could be up to two weeks if the upper limit for banking was not hit), and ultimately fraud. Employees would do the one for you, one for me trick but always within a 'shorts and overs' limit so the discrepancy could be put down to operator/customer error. The coins were then laundered through the sandwich/fruit machine/canteen back at base. As soon as I brought in contactless the canteen saw a massive drop in revenue and the fruit machine and sandwich machine were removed not long after. Multiply this across 60 depots up and down the UK alone and then add in another 14 countries or so across and you get an idea of the potential losses that were being incurred.

Seeming decent enough is the key to scamming people.

One task in a former job of mine was to empty cash from a vending machine. There was a spell when I regularly found Swaziland Lilangeni coins in the machine. Apparently this was a thing as they worked but could be got for something like 12p.

They were also Indian and I didn't want to get accused of being racist - which I've had before when refusing a ludicrously low offer for something else I was selling.

Anyway, lesson learned.

Reminds me of a school trip to France many years ago, where the coach driver was explaining that you needed a 10 Franc coin to get a trolley in the hyper market but, being English, we had the old 2p coin...

The problem with counterfeit money is that people will often try to pass it on so as not to incur a loss, given that handing it over to the authorities will not result in any kind of reimbursement.

And in west Germany a uk 5p(old style) could be substituted for a 1 mark coin.

It's been 7 hours and nobody has posted this yet, so I'm going to.

youtube.com/watch?v=xG6oCrtef5A&

Never seen that before! Very funny.

Not fake, but I saw a few African ( can't remember which country it was) old pound coins. Almost identical. Most in my change from pubs

Anyone had fake new plastic notes? Tbh it's been years since I've seen fake notes. 

I suspect pound coins are too low value these days to bother the effort on.... 

I think you must be right. It seems as if there are few fake new £1 coins but plenty of fake £2 coins. I would imagine the production process is similar but too expensive at only a £1 return.