Two 1994 pound coins, one fake, one real.

[randomness]

Counterfeit British one pound coins have been a problem for a number of years.


From an article in Significance Magazine.
In all the years I visited the UK I'd never found a fake pound coin. I was either lucky or insufficiently attentive, possibly both. A couple of weeks ago I finally got a coin that I recognized as fake. I thought I'd take a few side-by-side photos of this particular counterfeit next to a pound coin of the same date I believe is real.

In the images below the counterfeit is on the left and genuine coin is on the right. Click on an image to enlarge it.


Obverse (front)
There is a slight color difference, but more or less within normal variation for pound coins.


Reverse (back)
I tried to preserve the rotation of each coin as I turned it over. The fake coin is slightly out of alignment, but not to an obvious extent.

Two photos of the edge:




The reeding (graining) on the edge is fainter and uneven on the fake. The inscription is also crudely lettered compared to the real coin. Worse yet, it is the wrong motto. On a real 1994 pound coin, the edge should read "NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT". Instead, it reads "DECUS ET TUTAMEN", which has been used in other years, but not in 1994.

Both coins make a similar dull thud when dropped onto a table, as pound coins do.

I have not weighed the two pounds but there is no discernable difference in heft when held.

The BBC says many fakes work in vending machines.

mrreid.org provides a convenient link to a WolframAlpha calculation of the current metal value of a pound coin. Currently, that calculation estimates that the face value of the pound is about twenty times the metal value. That large difference is evidently enough to attract counterfeiters.

Comments

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

This seems like another reason to go with paper money for moderate to large denominations.*

Although I do love the feel of pound coins; they are like the one coin that I feel strongly positive about.

(*I'm assuming that paper is harder to counterfeit - all those special tricksy things you can add to it that require special machines and materials - but maybe I'm wrong.)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Paper money is harder to counterfeit, mainly because a great deal of effort has been devoted to security features for documents. Polymer money is even harder to counterfeit. That, and the fact that it lasts longer in circulation have convinced a whole host of issuing authorities to switch to polymer.

That having been said, I've seen examples of counterfeit polymer notes on display. They look pretty convincing.

Coins can also have security features added to them. The new Canadian $1 and $2 coins are a good example.

One of the problems with anti-counterfeiting features on coins is that they need to last a long time through quite a lot of wear over decades and still work, long after a paper or even polymer note has been retired and destroyed. The other is that people pay even less attention to coinage than they do to banknotes.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Right, that's what I was thinking - with no security features, I bet paper is much easier to counterfeit. But you can throw all sorts of stuff in it, whereas a coin is (mostly) just a coin. Anything is counterfeitable with enough time and resources, but I imagine that just like cars, if you make it hard enough, the crooks will go spend their energy on someone else's?

The Canadian coins are nifty, though! (But I bet those features significantly raise the cost of creating them.)

Does anybody counterfeit quarters, do you know? Or is it below the "worth it" line?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Does anybody counterfeit quarters, do you know? Or is it below the "worth it" line?

I did actually know a guy in high school who showed me a bag of copper slugs the size of quarters. But those were blank. They wouldn't fool anything but a rather unsophisticated machine.

One characteristic of American dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins is that they are actually a sandwich of two layers of cupro-nickel surrounding a core of copper. It's a fairly simple measure that both makes the coin harder to counterfeit and lowers its metal value.

Vending machines check for the characteristics of this sandwich, which aren't the same as either component.

A problem with the pound coin is that it is a consistent metal alloy, which is easy to fake. The alloy is also cheap, which makes the profit margin high whether it's for the Mint or for a counterfeiter. No US coin nowadays except the nickel is now a single alloy through and through. Even the penny is copper-coated zinc.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

When I was little there were slugs from the round punch-outs in some heavy electrical panel boxes, that would fool soda machines. I think they were vaguely quarter-sized. I had a few; I think my dad heard about it from a friend who was a blast furnace control systems engineer.

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I knew of people who would use similar techniques to cheat video game machines (back when coin op video games were a big deal).

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Anything is counterfeitable with enough time and resources, but I imagine that just like cars, if you make it hard enough, the crooks will go spend their energy on someone else's?

Right. "You don't need to run faster than the bear..."

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I found this article from 1999 in the Hartford Courant about fake quarters turning up in Connecticut shoreline towns.

[frotz.livejournal.com]

Quarters are interesting in that much of their utility (for me at least!) comes via coin-operated devices. Just making one that will pass with a machine seems generally sufficient and much easier.

FWIW, two drachma coins are astonishingly close to quarters, close enough to fool most machines.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are actually a whole host of non-US coins that used to work in many machines. I'm told cigarette machines were particularly bad at rejecting them. The vending machine industry has gradually caught up, though. Hardly any of these coins will work in a modern machine.* Older parking meters would usually take any disk of the right diameter.

Back in the day there were coin dealers offering coins by the pound, the vast majority of which were quarter-sized and vaguely the same weight. One dealer in Connecticut told me his source was vending machine operators. If you went to his shop, you could pick through the bags and just buy the coins you wanted at the same price, which was a labor-intensive but fun thing to do on a weekend afternoon.

He also had a supply of transit tokens, sold by the pound. Most of these were no longer valid even back then but I did pick up quite a few I was able to use in transit systems, as well as many interesting tokens from long-defunct transit operators.

He retired long ago. I bought one last bag of coins from him by driving over to his house in the suburbs to pick it up in order to save the rather high postage charge, but that was it. Not long after that I stopped seeing his classified ads.

*Notable exceptions: the current coins of the Panamanian balboa up to 1/2 balboa, which are made to the "same weight, dimensions, and composition" as American coinage. Since the balboa can also be exchanged for dollars at par--they even use US dollars for their notes--this is essentially irrelevant for fraud purposes. I did get a Panamanian 1/4 balboa in change at one point, I think.