Hard to know, but what I do know is it tends to be done in bulk. You need someone with a job that handles a lot of cash e.g. a sandwich shop. Then they are given 1,000 coins to mix in with the float.
What I don't know is the going rate for 1,000 fakes.
Bulk shipments of as many as 500,000 have been intercepted in the past, although that was further up the distribution chain than someone trying to actually pass them off in retail: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-33650317
Lucrative for sure as one can tell from the number of fake in circulation. Very lucrative maybe not, I doubt one can become a billionaire unless maybe if the manufacturer if he was the only one making the fakes.
I was curious how much the penny costs to mint as to put your number into context. Only to find the Royal Mint won't release per coin detail since they mint other coins not for the UK it's classed as a commercial secret. Which means for all the effort put into our currency we might actually be turning a profit on the capability.
That doesn't really answer the question though. Is all the effort to create a fake 1 GBP coin worth it? Unless you have access to the right equipment, I can't imagine it is based on the effort to make each coin.
If you can make 8x1 GBP coins a hour, then you clear a cool 64 GBP each day. Better than nothing (and tax free!), but there are a lot of jobs that pay better than that.
Yes. That's why the government doesn't want amateurs cutting in on their business.~
Some people--though not many--survive that can remember when newly-minted coins still had silver in them. Then governments all over the world got greedy and debased their coinage, upping the seigniorage to obscene levels to turn their mints into profit centers instead of cost centers.
So whenever I see governments complaining about counterfeit currency, I feel that they are hoist on their own petard. They learned it by watching you. I am honestly impressed that a system run almost entirely on public confidence can get away with so much chronic, endemic chicanery.
I was really hoping that India's little experiment in destroying its economy by removing larger-denomination cash would have resulted in a tiny bit of blood in the streets, pour encourager les autres. Without pushback, the trend will continue. So the world really, really needs a currency system that no one can effectively manipulate. Bitcoin gave me hope, but so far no cryptocurrency is anywhere near ready for universal adoption.
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!
I'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.
But 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.
I 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.
Sure. I don't see what that changes though - my point is that counterfeiting is profitable for the (criminal) counterfeiters, so it's not the case that it "doesn't really matter".
You'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.
Yes, 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.
At 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.
What 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.
US 5 cent coins (aka nickels) are (or used to be) the same diameter and weight as 20p sterling coins as well, as a grad student in London I may have accidentally used a few in vending machines and doing laundry...
The old (pre ~2005) New Zealand 50cent coin was a match for 5 franc coin in Switzerland (~5USD). I knew postgrads that would always stock up to use in vending machines, after finding that out I've always been curious to know how much research a mint does to prevent this from being possible.
> 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:
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?
>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!
I was standing in front of two vending machines the other day: one for food, one for drink, and all I had was a $5 bill. I wanted food, but the food machine would only take $1s and coins. On the other hand, the drink machine took $5s.
So I put my money in the drink machine and hit the coin return. Nothing happened. I tried a few times and figured the coin return was broken or that it was out of coins. The only thing in the machine was soda, which I can't drink if I don't want to trigger my acid reflux. But I bought one anyway since otherwise my money was "wasted", thinking I'd give the soda to a friend later.
Of course, once I bought the soda, the machine spat out all my change: 3 quarters and 2 dollar coins - now I finally had coins that I could buy food with. Naturally, the food machine didn't accept dollar coins. Most machines here don't, so no food for me.
The food machine accepted coins and $1 bills, but not $1 coins or other bills? It almost sounds intentionally designed to be as difficult to use as possible. (I realize the $1 coin is larger and newer, and accepting larger denomination bills would mean dispensing more change, but still.)
USPS vending machines are well-known as the main non-bank source of $1 coins. (E.g. insert a $10 bill for $7 worth of stamps, and get 3x $1 coins back.) IIRC, a long time ago they didn't actually take these coins as payment in the first place...
I want with a guy who had fake money come out an ATM in the middle of Cusco, Peru. I offered to buy it off him as a souvenir, and offered about half face value. I was out bid by 2 others and in the end he decided to keep it as a souvenir.
I have noticed that a lot of old 10p coins are noticeably a lot thinner (presumably worn down rather than starting out thinner)
Prior to about 2010, 5p and 10p coins really were thinner. They were changed from copper/nickel alloy (Cupronickel) to nickel-plated steel to reduce costs. But in order to maintain the same weight, the coins had to be made thicker.
Your second link made me laugh, both because the blogger guessed that I was admiring a specific photo and the gradual reveal of the true level of the incompetence on display.
I think it's really hard for a layperson to detect these. I've been checking for months my change and still havne't spotted a convincing example. Every blog or page explaining them requires generally deep knowledge around what dots should be where or what the correct symbology is for the issue year, etc.
It's lettering/patterns/quality on the edges that I find I can spot counterfeits for, and misalignment is a dead giveaway - see GP's first link for examples of that where it's a few degrees off, or completely reversed.
As 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.
I 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
Perhaps 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.
If 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.
I 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.
Likewise 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.
Yes, 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.
I find that in cities near the border, Canadian and US coins are interchangeable and usually accepted at par. In Toronto there are a fair amount of US coins in circulation, and I've never had an issue using them here.
Helps that each of our coins are almost exactly the same size and weight for all common denominations.
I just got back from Whistler BC. Because Vancouver tends to take USD, and Whistler is not far (and is even more heavily touristed by % than Vancouver, I'm sure), I figured we'd have no problems with USD.
Mostly we paid with cards, but my wife brought a few US$100 bills. It was silly to try to spend them for small purchases, but one night we had a CAD$60 dinner and we asked if we could use USD (hadn't been a problem anywhere else). They said yes, BUT they'd only accept it at 1:1. Obviously that's their prerogative, but it seemed silly to expect us to eat $18 or thereabouts, so instead they ate the credit card transaction fees. shrug
Granted, this is probably not bad policy in general because they're going to be even less expert at spotting fake US currency than US-based merchants are.
I once got a Swazi Lilangeni coin [1] in change from a machine at Paddington station. Could it have been one of those? As an entirely above board numismatic dealer selling them in bulk [2] says:
"they are lovely looking coins, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the British One Pound coin [...] All of the One Lilangeni coin attributes are exactly the same as the British One Pound coin."
Too 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
I 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.
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.
Wouldn't be surprised if the surveillance infrastructure for physical mail started deteriorating already and a beautiful handcrafted, scented letter with calligraphy could fly under the radar.
A government cryptocurrency could be built on a blockchain, but there is really little point. Some properties that it would need are:
* It's backed by usual pounds by the treasury, which means only they get to issue new coins (no public mining rewards).
* Court judgements must be able to block, reverse or force transactions. This means either the government gets a copy of all private keys, or simply has master keys for the system.
* UK government would probably want to attach names to all accounts, so new wallets could probably be only generated on some gov.uk site, or participating businesses like existing banks.
In the end, the blockchain is wasteful and inefficient when you could just have a big-ass server somewhere with an API.
> * Court judgements must be able to block, reverse or force transactions. This means either the government gets a copy of all private keys, or simply has master keys for the system.
You can certainly avoid that, just make it part of the protocol. You could create currency with such rules on top of Ethereum today. Court judgments simply become a part of trusted oracle.
Compared to the "It's a day ending in 'y', so a cryptocurrency or a cryptocurrency exchange probably got hacked today" pattern, I'll take the physical coin.
Reading the title that's exactly what I expected, discovering that it was simply a redesign of an actual coin was a let down. I guess this is related to the UK being close to falling apart due to brexit.
Lol, how is the UK close to falling apart? Do you mean literally that the union is falling apart or more figuratively speaking that the country is unravelling?
Odds are increased that Scotland will eventually go for independence. Northern Ireland is closer than ever to a Republican majority in Stormont and speculations are on the rise that a border poll might be on the table in the near future (as in within not too many years; it will still take time) and even some unionists appears to accept that there is a greater than ever chance of a unified Ireland. More importantly: at least some unionists appears more accepting of that possibility, as they see Brexit as yet another example of Norther Irelands concerns being ignored - how the negotiations unfolds will potentially have a dramatic effect on the Northern Ireland issue as a result.
Irrespective of that, it's pretty clear that Brexit will force Westminster into promising drastically increased levels of devolution not just to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but also to the major urban regions like Greater Manchester and Greater London that will reduce the de facto power of Westminster dramatically and allow the regions to drift even more apart in terms of differences in public policy.
At the same time there is a major split amongst those who considers themselves predominantly or only British or who considers themselves British first vs. those who predominantly see themselves as English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish first, and British second or not at all, with "Britishness" being weak and fractured.
Basically, to a lot of people living here, the UK means as little or even less than the EU, compared to other parts of their identity.
And a lot of the political discourse has been around how the elites ignore people. What people are about to find out is that in that respect the London elite were the ones ignoring them, not Brussels, and accordingly Brexit will not solve any of the problems they had in that respect.
Expect to see increasing upheaval and pressure for more power to be devolved from Westminster as a result. E.g. after the Brexit vote there was a brief flash of people talking about pushing for independence for London, and while that won't happen anytime soon if ever, expect to see those debates flash up again and lead to an actual (if miniscule) political movement at some point over the next couple of years.
I personally think that while the UK may persist in some form, the UK 10 years from now is reasonably likely to exclude Scotland, and the UK 30 years from now is likely to exclude Northern Ireland, and be more like a loose federation with massively devolved powers to Wales and several English regions and at least Manchester and London. Maybe even with increasing support for Welsh independence.
I honestly though Brexit was good for the EU and the rest of the world. The GBP was terribly overvalued. Why did the UK get a free pass on not implementing the Euro and not being a part of the Schengen Area?
It's been nine months and starting the article 50 process is suppose to happen soon, but I have a feeling the UK will negotiate its way into the Economic Zone instead, keeping trade and immigration without work visas, while forfeiting their place on the EU parliament. Either that or they'll just ignore the will of the people and never leave.
I kinda hoped that they'd include something like an RFID chip with something like a certificate inside, signed by the royal mint (Turkish government recently switched IDs to something like that).
That'd allow verifying every single new coin (unless it is damaged to the level of breaking the rfid chip, but I suppose that's not that easy).
It'd also enable tracking. I kinda regret that idea now. BUT if used responsibly, that can significantly reduce the counterfeiting by the means of somehow cloning the RFID chip (which wouldn't be simple if done properly -- there aren't any successful attacks on proper implementations of stuff like mifare desfire EV1/EV2 afaik). A coin was used on a market on london on 10am and with an ATM on Glasgow on 10:30am? Yeah, flag that coin down.
Well people had been stating on this thread that if that was the hidden feature, it'd not be "hidden" for long as anyone can get and cut open a coin to see if there's anything like that inside.
Interesting, I wonder if it's like the EMV credit cards. I wonder if this stuff is standardized, are the ID and credit card chips the same? Having the same readers would be useful, especially if all countries started doing that. Would be a little insane to have like a tower of card readers at like airports. "Oh your from America use the one in the middle" "Your from Canada use the one at the bottom."
If the same hardware, then I guess the only different would be that the public keys would be associated with somthing else. But it's probably a huge patent mess to make this a standard for all countries and states.
I know two stores in my area that don't even support chip cards and this was within going in the past year. One has the readers, but they don't work. The other has no chip readers at all.
I always thought paper signing was a bit outdated, especially since schools don't teach cursive really. We spent like a hour on it, and then next topic!
But then if someone stole your ID, lost it, etc... They could sign for things... but people can forge your signature anyways... Maybe if the machine had a camera in it to take a selfie when you use the card, but a bit creepy in a way to.
In Germany this is actually used in all cigarette or alcohol dispensers.
You can pay via EC card or via cash, but you first need to verify age via EC card or ID.
EC cards (kinda like debit cards) and ID cards have two age verification functions, of which only one per minute can be called, these just verify if the account holder is > 16 or > 18.
So you press the button to get a bottle of beer, the system checks if you’re 16, you pay, and you get it.
Or you press the button to get a bottle of vodka, the system checks if you’re 18, you pay, and you get it.
All this is standard tech, supported by any normal RFID or card reader, and you can use the same reader for secure home banking, for verification, etc.
Well, the standardization was covered by others, so here's stuff about forgery:
The Turkish Govt's new ID allows you to- no, it requires you to set a password. You are given an 8 character PIN code when you apply for the ID, and you can change it from the kiosks at the citizenship bureau. It allows between 4 and 16 characters (while I chose 16 myself, most people will choose a 4 character one :( ).
Plus, even if it gets stolen along with the password, technically the certificate can be revoked as soon as you report it, preventing forgery.
They can, depending on how they work. If the values are being fetched from a secure chip, however, I believe it's not as easy. And as I said, even if it is copied, unless it is spent VERY carefully, it can be spotted and marked as copied.
How much would it cost, though? I mean if a pound coin costs more than a pound, that's not good (that's possible even with the dumb coins, I recently heard that the turkish one kurus costs two and a half turkish kurus).
(edit: when I say "cost" I mean the production cost)
Since most money is held in banks, electronic transactions, etc - the question is more the 'value of supporting this denomination in currency to the economy' than the cost of a coin.. Like of $100M USD worth of tax/federal reserve interest revenue is generated from $10M of $100 bills that cost $15M to produce, it's not really a loss, but a business expense...
It seems that cost-to-produce vs. face-value isn't a terribly important ratio. The US has continued making pennies for a lot longer than necessary, though it seems to cost ~1.5c to make them.
Well, a pound coin is used more than once, and there is tax applied on every time it is used, so it'll pay off for itself in a relatively short timespan, imo. Plus, it pretty much beats counterfeits, so loss from that is gone too.
Problem with 1 kurus was that it wasn't used often, the monetary value was small and that it had no anti-counterfeit stuff. Also, people were melting it and selling it. You can't really sell a broken or write-protected rfid chip for much.
I think it's some kind of radio signal transceiver, because I saw a video where they talk about detecting it at high speed from a small distance as coins pass through a system.
It could be a passive radio device, maybe just a loop of ferromagnetic material that gives a particularly noticeable electromagnetic response when excited at a certain radiofrequency.
A 1 uCi radioactive source is exempt in the USA yet quite easily detectable.
I suspect sooner or later someone is going to try radioactive currency.
I'm so old that when I went to uni we did a neutron activation of silver experiment in physics class because the half life of whatever isotope of silver was about a minute, so after an hour of lab you could put the coin back in your pocket. I don't know if they'd let college kids play with either a solid silver quarter from a few decades ago (probably worth a couple bucks today) OR a low level neutron source today. I could see picking some very obscure isotope of some obscure metal and dissolving it into the metal of the coin and if your xray metal analysis machine that scrapyards have (a kilobuck ish cost in a hand held device) detects the proper amount of iridium or whatever or a simple neutron activation followed by gamma spectrometer shows the right isotope in there...
Aside from spontaneous emissions and activation reactions, there are some weird cross sections out there. Whatever's irresistable to thermal neutrons thats used in reactors, probably a cadmium alloy, could be the core of a coin, and then blasting boring thermal neutrons that are semi-transparent to fakes but the cadmium core coins would look pitch black from eating all the neutrons. Or play the opposite game and make the coins out of pure neutron-transparent zirconium and only the neutron transparent coins are legit.
Especially for an object designed for mass circulation, any secret information about such a coin would be found out through various destructive engineering techniques, and then the info would be in the wild anyway. Coins have been proven to work for the past millenia without any major changes and I don't see a space for innovation within it.
One could replace a coin by a small circuit that represents a physically unclonable function and a cryptographic certificate by the state, saying that this is a valid coin.
Make it look like a normal coin so people can trade by hand, but in any store interaction they could be checked.
>iSIS™ (Integrated Secure Identification Systems) is a direct derivation of covert and forensic features used in banknotes, comprising a unique additive technology – already used not only in banknotes but also in other industries such as fuel and perfume. This, however, is the first time it has been applied to coinage.
>The additive is incorporated into coins using The Royal Mint’s aRMour® full-plate technology and can be authenticated via high-speed automated detection. As it forms part of the electroplating process, it is not a surface coating and will not wear off over time.
Maybe it can be detected by spectral analysis of light like they do to see what gasses the sun is made of?
I was about to post the same link. They couldn't have thought of a worse name for it.
IIRC when copper-plated steel 1p and 2p coins were introduced (up until then they were bronze), they caused havoc with vending machines, whose manufacturers weren't forewarned.
I know there was some public talk a few years back about them using a combination of phosphorescent materials that absorbed and re-emitted specific frequencies of light. Not sure if that's what they ended up going with in the end.
I read it with the meaning “the pound won’t be in use for long” at first which seemed rather incongruous. I was wondering whether there was something I had missed about happenings with respect to brexit (I’m Australian, never been to the UK). It took me a while to interpret it as “the shape of the pound is changing from a circle to a dodecahedron”.
Thanks to the "you see what you expect to see" effect, it took me until someone pointed out the pun before I realized the word was "round" and not "around".
Fortunately the domain name is rather less ambiguous and primed me for the weak pun. I'm ... glad(?) that the wordplay survived the marketeering sessions and civil service vetting.
BTW: dodecahedron is the solid object, dodecagon is the 12-sided polygon. D&D style dice as currency would be pretty awesome but it might make it difficult to resolve dilemmas using pocket change.
-It would definitely be amusing, but given the current state of affairs - basically, the public is ignorant and vending machines are used to weed out the fakes - I don't think your average counterfeiter would care.
After all, your fakes don't need to be perfect; they just need to be good enough to enter the system without you getting caught every time.
(Which leads me to wonder - how do counterfeiters insert their fake coins in the monetary system? Where can you spend a lot of coin without arousing suspicion?)
-Coins sold at a discount to people who, perfectly aware they are fakes, use them for small purchases?
-Perhaps more likely - the customer is your friendly neighbourhood cigarette shop, which then mixes them in the change they give?
-Are some vending machines so bad at detecting fakes that you can use those (preferably ones with no security camera watching, which can be a challenge in the UK nowadays) to launder your fakes?
-Other?
Off to google I go. I really wonder how one can make a viable business model from getting fake coins into circulation.
I just looked over the £1 coins in my desk drawer (22!) - I found two dodgies. Perhaps I should bring them to the UK next time and ask in a bank - they may be just worn...
I think this will be a Crim2Crim business model, selling £100 fakies for £50/£40/£30 real to other crims depending on volume.
I'd be interested to find out about who makes the molds / dies and sets up the machines to manufacture these. I like to think its some eccentric retired machinist in a shed in the middle of the Yorkshire countryside :)
> Which leads me to wonder - how do counterfeiters insert their fake coins in the monetary system? Where can you spend a lot of coin without arousing suspicion?)
There are plenty of corner shops that'll happily sell you duty free tobacco amongst other non-legal things. I'm sure they'd be happy to take £100 worth of fake coins and mix them into their tills/takings/change if it only costs them £40. The difference can go into their pocket.
When it was first announced, I read that it was a series of phosphors embedded in the metal. As the coin wore with age, different ones would become detectable at the surface.
Obviously I have no idea of the veracity of that, or the accuracy of my memory of the potentially fictitious article.
Security through obscurity isn't a bad thing. The army uses security through obscurity by using camouflage. The only issue with it is when it is only 'security through obscurity'.
For example, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommends:
> For external-facing servers, reconfigure service banners not to report the server and OS type and
version, if possible
Indeed, the biggest problem with security through obscurity is not that people use it, but when people overestimate the level of protection it gives them and reduces other protections accordingly.
What's even the benefit of anti-counterfeiting measures that people don't know about? It doesn't matter if you fail a test that nobody knows to run.
Presumably some people will know about it, but who? If banks are the only places that can detect a fake, for example, does that gain you anything?
I suppose you can do something like "ah, this bank is getting a lot of fake coins, which means they're probably getting injected somewhere in the local area, maybe let's interview some people who've been cashing them in and see if there are any businesses they all frequent". Might be valuable.
Perhaps that's the point. They have a secret method for checking the authenticity of a coin such that counterfeiters do not know to imitate. This doesn't help the population to distinguish counterfeits, but it may help the government more easily keep track of the ratio of counterfeit coins out there.
My understanding is there is some luminescence profile that is very easy to create from basic chemicals if you know the quantities of those chemicals. But that it is very difficult to establish the precise quantities from the luminescence profile. In effect, a "one-way chemical reaction hash".
To be fair, all security is a form of security through obscurity. An encryption key is just very, very obscure.
If this security feature could only be reproduced using a bunch of PhD chemists and millions of dollars of lab equipment, then the security can be considered to be pretty obscure. Even the strongest key based encryption system is vulnerable to brute force attacks if you have enough computer power.
> "Approximately one in thirty £1 coins in circulation is a counterfeit."
That took me completely by surprise. Is there really that much of a market in counterfeit coins? The profit margins just seem so modest relative to counterfeit bills.
They have a relatively high value and are easily faked (currently no bimetal design like the £2 coin or 1/2 Euro coins) – and nobody looks for counterfeit coins.
Due to the lower value the risk is also much lower, apart from vending machines who actually checks coins for fake and refuse them ?
For a merchant the cost of annoying a potentially unaware customer is more than the value of the coin that he will probably simply give back to another customer as change.
Try using an actual real 500€ bill anywhere else than Germany.
> That took me completely by surprise. Is there really that much of a market in counterfeit coins? The profit margins just seem so modest relative to counterfeit bills.
If no one's checking for counterfeit coins, and the users themselves don't know they exist, it sounds like a pretty awesome opportunity for the counterfeiters.
Just take a look at the number of comments here saying the same thing as you - from a counterfeiter's perspective, it sounds pretty ideal.
But, what do you do with your counterfeit coins? You've invested all this money and effort in minting equipment, but it would look extremely weird to spend more than like 20 at once.
Unless they can fool machines, it seems very inefficient.
My best bet, after mulling this over for a few minutes is that the fake coins are sold in bulk to people who handle lots of small change - kiosks, fast-food joints etc - then they just mix them in with the real money in the register for giving change.
Broke a 20 getting intoxicated in a bar/coffeeshop, then bought a kebab after on my walk back. Kebab shop was only place I got metal change that night.
I didn't notice until the next day when a coffee place threw a fuss when I used it to pay for my espresso.
I suspect they often mix them in for drunk tourists.
The UK has a large market in coin-operated gambling machines - there are heavily-regulated low-stakes ones in all kinds of non-casino locations and, I think, higher-stakes ones in legal betting shops.
A relative who works in the industry told me he sees large numbers of counterfeit pound coins. I would guess counterfeiters might launder coins through machines. Or even, though I've never seen it, sell discount coins directly to gamblers? In any case machine recognition would be a high priority. The machines in question would be relatively unsophisticated ones with a thickness gauge and a 'ski jump' that effectively checks the weight.
Many gambling machines have a 70% return. Ie. 70% of money put in is paid out again.
One could probably go to a casino with a bag of fake coins, put 50 in each machine, and take any and all winnings. Some machines even pay out winnings in notes.
Britain has relatively liberal gambling laws, so you wouldn't need to go to a casino. High-street betting shops can have up to four fixed-odds betting terminals, which offer electronic versions of standard casino games. European (single zero) roulette has a house edge of just 2.7%.
FOBT winnings are paid out via a receipt that is redeemed over the counter, so you can use them to convert coins into notes very easily. Gambling winnings are not subject to tax in the UK, so these machines are an extremely attractive money laundering method. Britain has around 9,000 betting shops, so it's easy to move around and avoid suspicion.
You mix in legitimate coins, and deposit them at a bank in Northern Ireland as takings from your (real) businesses. With a rotating cast of 20-ish fronts (each with multiple bank accounts), you could put in £1MM+ a month easy & transfer it onwards as normal-looking purchases.
Note that this was a great way to get millions of coins into circulation back in the early 2000s, not so easy now.
Don't vending machines have the ability to check by weight/size? Couldn't a bank just have that in their counting machine? If you have like 50% fakes it is going to look fishy.
I work on a market stall in London at the weekends. In my experience it's probably higher than that, you get given some really ropey ones but everyone just treats them normally because there's so many in circulation the banks don't even bother to reject them. I can totally see why they're replacing it.
Funnily, the new "most secure" pound will be introduced one day before a pretty big event, Mrs. May's Article 50 invocation, which widely predicted to devalue the pound significantly.
You might buy new pounds as "secure" coins, but you'll probably some percentage of their value the next day...
There is a strong emotional effect at play, so it's hard to say what will happen. I know someone currently buying a house, and the question of what will happen when Article 50 is invoked has been a persistent theme. E.g. in London, thousands of banking jobs may hang in the balance, with at least one bank having made it very clear internally that once Article 50 is invoked they will start planning which jobs to move - something that for that bank alone will start to shift massive amounts in salaries out of London (hundreds of millions at least)
On one hand finally getting clarity might be good news in that some people who have held back might spend more once the uncertainty of the immediate reaction is out of the way. On the other hand for a lot of people it makes things definite and will cause more cautious spending patterns, and there's still plenty of other uncertainty.
It also starts the clock, which will make people speculate about the timing.
I haven't the faintest clue how that will make traders respond. What I do know is that because I don't have the faintest clue how it will make people respond, I'm acting accordingly cautiously, and have cut my spending considerably since the referendum, and I know many others in the same situation, and indeed the UK has a whole has seen consumer debt levels drop substantially.
All this to say that it is foolish to assume that it boils down to whether or not the actual event itself is expected or not.
There's a number of indications that people are being cautious [1] [2] [3], but most people don't have the disposable income to allow substantial reductions in spending, given the low levels of salary increases ever since 2008. Basically ver since then low interest credit has been used as a substitute, and driven UK consumer debt levels to crazy heights.
I for one thinks that recession or not, a lot of people are setting themselves up for major pain once interest rates start moving up again and would be best served by doing what they can to cut down on spending.
At the moments large parts of the handling of the UK economy appears to be based on trying to push problems ahead of us in the hope that things will start looking rosier some day. Instead it's looking scarier and scarier.
this sort of doom-saying and cherry-picking of statistics to derive a narrative is in itself harmful, as the economy is almost entirely based on consumer demand and confidence
brexit itself doesn't change the fact there's a short term business cycle driven by credit and low interest rates
> At the moments large parts of the handling of the UK economy appears to be based on trying to push problems ahead of us in the hope that things will start looking rosier some day.
capitalism is based entirely on eternal exponential growth, which is clearly not sustainable, there's nothing UK specific about this
> this sort of doom-saying and cherry-picking of statistics to derive a narrative is in itself harmful, as the economy is almost entirely based on consumer demand and confidence
Consumer demand and confidence largely comes from how safe people feel in their jobs and whether or not they get raises, not statistics. I'm sure there's some feedback, but my own cautious spending is a direct result of knowing of direct threats to a substantial number of jobs, and seeing the consequences of e.g. potential clients pulling back on spending. I'm not very worried about my own income, but the only reason I'm not very worried is that my disposable income is high enough that I can sustain drops without being affected much.
Meanwhile e.g. my ex. has to deal with knowing that hundreds of jobs where she works will be cut (and no, that's not rumours - she works in HR and has direct knowledge of the plans) as a consequence of Brexit. If the negotiations goes badly, it will be several times that.
That is the kind of things that's causing consumer confidence to soften.
> brexit itself doesn't change the fact there's a short term business cycle driven by credit and low interest rates
No, but it has directly affected that starting to come to and end because of softening consumer confidence.
> capitalism is based entirely on eternal exponential growth, which is clearly not sustainable, there's nothing UK specific about this
No, but there is something UK specific about currently being in a situation where the government has chosen to drastically cut public spending at a time when low salary growth has left people using low credit as a means to keep the party going, and are then suddenly hit by events that cause a great deal of uncertainty over their ability to continue to service debt.
In my case the anecdote is data for my specific case: It explain the direct causes of my decision to reign in my spendings. It is not data that we can use to extrapolate whether or not consumer confidence is softening, but I have already presented a number of references to actual data on that.
You'd think so, but every stage in the process so far has led to another drop, at least temporarily, even though they've all be widely trailed beforehand.
The fact that it will occur and likely outcomes has been priced in, but there will possibly be new information on government strategy which may move prices up or down.
It's ok, the coin will only connect to websites over an ethernet connection, and will only load a particular site if it can validate the full certificate chain.
A sufficiently crafted coin would be an interesting attack vector against a vending machine, for example. I'm interested to see how counterfeiters would be able to use a passive/active security device within the coin for potential gain.
Big surprise the downloads-provided primarily online currency has better online security than the single page landing site of a primarily physical currency.
It looks like the only problem is they've missed off the GoDaddy intermediate certificate (which presumably most users will have cached from other sites). Funny how all the more complicated things like ciphers are considered well-configured but something simple like this is missed, but I guess it's an easy mistake to make (if you're not checking ssllabs) depending on how the certificates have been supplied by the vendor.
A friend failed opening it at all (while I can open it in FF51) and clicking it directly from discord gave tons of SSL issues (screenshotted here: https://s.ave.zone/556.png ). Yeaah, pretty secure, I guess.
To demonstrate feasibility and estimate costs. The tech could then eventually be rolled out but since Germany is part of the EU for EU-wide legal tender all mints need to switch: "standard" euro coins have a common design and reverse, and a national obverse (with some restrictions).
My guess it's because the production cost is too high, and counterfeit euro coins aren't a big enough problem to warrant them. Also having a germany-only euro coin in wide circulation would be a bit backwards and impractical, so they would have to implement them in all 19 euro countries.
Who says they don't have plans to apply this technology in quantity production in future (just not yet)? I consider it as a very sensible choice to use a one-off collectors item to make a first test towards mass production.
As a case study before introducing it into general circulation.
Developing a new coin for hundreds of millions of people in daily use is a big task, it’s easier to start with a subset of 80 million potential users to demonstrate feasibility, and test.
While looking into this coin, I saw that next month they are going to release another one with a red polymer ring, and plan to have 4 more designs with different colors until 2021 (so 6 different designs in total).
If you do it on a large enough scale you'd get inflation as you have more money supply for the same amount of goods so that the money loses value. This would then lead the central bank to raise rates to counteract inflation. This in turn is bad for the economy (more expensive to take out a loan leads to less investment) so you could get a recession. I doubt that you'd be able to inject enough counterfeit money for that, though.
However, most central banks do that on a much larger scale at the moment to get that inflation and it doesn't really work (the Bank of England has stopped that though).
Not so sure about NI. Do you think the economy could survive without UK membership? Don't you think NI-independence would be seen as an attempt at re-uniting Ireland, and hence bring back the troubles?
Scotland could certainly use the pound (like how Cuba and Zimbabwe use USD), but England (and Wales) wouldn't like it and might move to make it difficult for them if they so wish.
If Scotland votes to leave it will be to remain in the EU debate after Indyref1 led me to conclude that Scotland would have to petition the EU to join as a new member instead of inheriting the UK's membership, and the EU requires new members to adopt the Euro... so if Indyref2 passes then they'll have the Euro.
Many commenters in this thread are speculating on how counterfeiters are inserting the, apparently large volume of, counterfeit coins. Maybe one source is actually unrepudible /merchants/. In dispensing change to customers, market participants it would seem be less likely to scrutinize the coinage.
> Many commenters in this thread are speculating on how counterfeiters are inserting the, apparently large volume of, counterfeit coins
I've written elsewhere that I reckon other criminal channels might be in use.
If you offer your street level drug dealers a choice of 1,000 pounds in "real" money or 2,000 in "fake," (or a mixture of them both) that'd probably do the job.
I'm working off the assumption that there's the exact same problem with distributing drugs.
Like, what would you do with a kilo or two of cocaine just lying around? Get many smaller dealers to handle the problem for you instead and make their money along the way.
If you also have some fake money lying around, I can't see any reason why you wound't try to combine the two.
This doesn't work because "your street level drug dealers" pay you, not the other way around. They get paid by keeping a portion of the proceeds, or of the drugs.
It works if you need to employ petty criminals for jobs other than sales, though.
Is it a curve of constant width like the 20p and 50p? If its sides are straight it cannot be.
Also from wiki:
> The new design is intended to make counterfeiting more difficult, via an undisclosed hidden security feature, called 'iSIS' (Integrated Secure Identification Systems). [1]
It can not. Reuleaux solids must have an odd number of vertices, or they indeed don't work. It would appear that I didn't have my brain fully on this morning.
To apply the principle of Reuleaux geometry to a regular shape with an even number of vertices, you'd make arcs tangent to the point in question, extending in a curve that increases the coin's diameter as the arc gets longer. The arc would come to an end in a point midway to the next point, where it would intersect with that point's arc. You'd have a star-shaped solid where all geometry external to the inscribed circle are tapered triangles. Kind of neat, but it would be tough to put through a vending machine.
> Is it a curve of constant width like the 20p and 50p? If its sides are straight it cannot be.
If I'm not mistaken it has to have an odd number of sides, but it has 12.
The sides looks like they might be very slightly curved in order to facilitate rolling. But it not being of constant width could still make life more difficult for vending machines etc.
> Hidden high security feature – a high security feature is built into the coin to protect it from counterfeiting in the future.
I bet there's an RFID in each coin that uniquely identifies each one. If true, it'd also let them (or a thief!) identify the total value of the coins jingling in your pocket.
> Approximately one in thirty £1 coins in circulation is a counterfeit.
That seems incredibly high! Anyone have comparable stats for US dollar bills or 1 Euro coins?
> The legal tender status of the round £1 coin will be withdrawn on 15th October 2017. From this date shops will no longer accept these coins, but you will still be able to take them to your bank. We would encourage you to use your coins or return them to your bank before 15th October.
Six-months is a pretty short window for something like this.
What prevents a shop from accepting the coins after Oct 15th and then they take it to the bank?
Also, how does the 1/30 fraud number impact the returns of the current pound notes?
> What prevents a shop from accepting the coins after Oct 15th and then they take it to the bank?
The law, which only allows individuals to exchange the old coins after that date. Yes, shopkeepers could change their bills for old pounds and then deposit them in person to their current accounts at the local branch, but if I'm a shopkeeper then I probably have better things to do with my time.
The Royal Mint is a state-owned enterprise and not a government department. For a start, they produce currency for other countries directly, which is not something the government would want to do.
Seems like there are £45m worth of counterfeit coins in circulation, but the switch may cost over £100 million.
____
EDIT: The percent of fake coins in circulation appears to be in flux, which makes me wonder what methods they use to estimate the fakes in circulation, if they use controls like injecting known fakes into the count to see if they are spotted, if the sample is truly random, the maths is correct, etc.:
1% 2004 [1]
3.03% May 2014 [2]
2.55% May 2015 [2]
Of note is that the Royal Mint states in the 2016 annual report that the last survey for fakes was in May 2015, but the report was issued in July 2016, which means at least as of that date they failed to do the annual survey; or at least publish the results.[3]
So there was no point in doing it? This seems super weird for a financial institution that should be looking at hard data; maybe they did some analysis about the increasing ease of forgery?
The main reason for doing it is that they don't want the public to lose faith in the "value" of the pound, which will eventually happen if forgeries become more abundant.
There is some kind of psychological cost too, since the money is only valued as much as people want to value it. Too much fakes might damage the brand more than the face value of the fake coins.
I would suspect the rate of introduction is increasing. So while maybe it took 20 years to circulate this 45m amount, they may expect the next 45m to come though in a few years. That and pride/confidence in money validity. This is my guess and not fact.
Anecdata, I know - but certainly even 5 years ago it was rare for me to spot a forgery in my change. Over the last few years I found more and more - so I'd think that the process and cost for creating fakes is dropping. Though since contactless payment has been around I can honestly say I've spent actual cash about 4 times this year so far, so my collection of 'interesting coins' has not been added to like it once was.
Sweden is also replacing the coins with new ones and a major advantage I keep hearing is that their weight is lighter, which reduce transportation costs and makes it easier for bank.
But I would guess from a public relation perspective, asking a whole population to replace their coins just to make it cheaper and easier for banks is a harder sell that arguing security.
It isn't really a cost/problem to "ask the whole population to replace their coins". Coins are constantly being circulated, with worn ones replaced by new ones anyway.
The cost of changing comes primarily from businesses having to update vending machines, coin counting machines, etc (as well as increased production costs due to the new security features.)
But this switch has been planned for many years, so businesses have had a long time to prepare.
From experience, the lighter weight makes the coins harder to tell apart. The old coins had three denominations: 1kr (~$0.10), medium sized, thin, silver; 5 kr (~$0.5), big, thin, silver; and 10 kr, small, thick, golden. Their big size (compared to Euro coins) make them comfortable in the hands and trivial to count the right amount.
By comparison, the new, smaller coins are much harder to grasp and the new denomination (2kr) is hard to tell apart from the new (1kr). The new notes are similarly hard to tell apart, as they all i) have the same height, and ii) use similar (pastel) colors.
"Never attribute to malice what you can blame on stupidity", but it almost feels like they are making the new cash hard to use on purpose.
Not sure if this is flawed, but I want to attempt an analogy that felt right to me.. Let's say they figured out catching a thief cost £500 and it became public knowledge the police wouldn't investigate any theft under £500. The cost of transitioning to the £1 seems worth it to prevent further abuse.
It might well be true, but the police themselves can't say that it's true in an irrevocable way. The recent indie film "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore" is an entertaining consideration of this scenario.
Your analogy is flawed because you are discussing investigating a crime that has been committed. The purpose of the new coin is to prevent the crime from being committed in the first place by making it harder to commit.
Given the expense of rolling out the new coin, it probably makes more sense from a economic and moral point of view to spend money investigating these crimes rather than preventing them.
I'd imagine the point is to prop up confidence in fiat money. Cash represents 3% of "money" so a small counterfeit issue with pound coins is a fraction of a %.
Meanwhile the entire currency is debased annually by failing to include land prices into the inflation calculations, despite most credit creation being against land.
This debases GBP for workers every year. Therefore propping up confidence is vital.
If forgers can infiltrate 2.5% to 3% of the market, there's no reason for them to stop at such modest levels. Why not try for 30%?
We also don't know anything about the volume of forged coins withdrawn from the market each month. If detection at pubs, grocery stores, etc. is poor, then fake coins enter the market at will and are detected only when merchants present their cash to banks. That's annoying for everyone, and it's possible to come up with scenarios in which each year sees 2x or even 5x the introduction of fake coins, with many of them staying in circulation for only a few months but causing damages anyway.
In either of these scenarios, clamping down now on forgery is economically prudent, even if the 100 > 45 comparison doesn't reveal the true cost.
The societal cost of counterfeiting goes far beyond the nominal value of the fake coins in circulation (approximately one in thirty one pound coins is a counterfeit).
Yea, it would be a bit like conflating the nominal value of currency in circulation and the actual value to society of having physical currency at all. There are huge multiplier effects.
There are £45m of fake pound coins in circulation currently. The various banks and mint, etc, will be removing them as they come in, taking losses from that. There's an ongoing cost every day.
If a one-time cost of £100m will remove the fake coins and prevent new fakes, it's well worth the price tag.
The new coin will not get rid of forgeries completely, at least not until the old is removed from circulation.
In pure money terms, it's not worth it.
But since they're printing money anyway, I guess if it's too costly, they can just print more money to pay for it ;)
Unlike large notes with security features, no one really checks £1 coins for authenticity. You can spend them all over the place with very low risk (especially if you can get anything useful from vending machines – buy a train ticket at a major station, for instance, and it'd be essentially risk-free).
It is definitely more efficient to counterfeit larger denominations but you also have to measure the relative difficulties and chance of getting caught.
The old £1 Coin was relatively easy and cheap to counterfeit and the counterfeits were practically perfect (I've had a few over the years, they're REALLY hard to spot unless you know what you're looking for, just Google "spot a fake £1" for some examples of how good they are).
Seems like many of the counterfeit coins come from abroad, in particular countries with a much lower cost of living and where counterfeiting foreign currency may be ignored. There's also a huge market in pushing counterfeit money onto foreign exchanges in other countries.
1 in 30 pound coins is fake. If you have a handful of smash and examine the pound coins you can usually find at least 1 fake one. Counterfeiters made millions before anyone caught on
Yes I wondered about the 'more secure' claim - secure for whom? I don't have any trouble spending counterfeit coins that may end up in my pocket. Where's the issue? Not with the public.
For comparison, the American $100 bill was widely counterfeited (by the Libyans?) to the tune of maybe a billion dollars in circulation. The US Treasury left it be for years - too costly to detect the very good copies. Eventually bills were reformulated to include harder-to-copy features but for years the only response was to print fewer. Since so many good ones were in circulation already.
It looks like a nicer version of the 1 euro coin. I like that the coin isn't round but 12-sided, which will certainly help visually impaired people use the coin. I wonder if they will introduce a new 6-sided 50p coin.
Euro Coins are actually designed to be distiguishable by blind people, they have different edges and sizes. I once was at a blindness awareness workshop and it is just one of those things you usually don't think about it.
416 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadWhat I don't know is the going rate for 1,000 fakes.
We know 1 in 30 £1 coins are counterfeit.
Take the amount of £1 coins in circulation. Sum the value. Divide by 30. Equals the market in counterfeit coins.
From http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/circulation-coin-... £1 are 1,671.328 £m / 30 = 55.71 £m
The market in counterfeit coins is therefore over 55 million pounds. This is, however the cumulative, total value of the market and not per year.
ref: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/costs_per_unit_of_min...
If you can make 8x1 GBP coins a hour, then you clear a cool 64 GBP each day. Better than nothing (and tax free!), but there are a lot of jobs that pay better than that.
I fear HN underestimates the amount of work people will do to avoid getting a boring (legal) job.
Some people--though not many--survive that can remember when newly-minted coins still had silver in them. Then governments all over the world got greedy and debased their coinage, upping the seigniorage to obscene levels to turn their mints into profit centers instead of cost centers.
So whenever I see governments complaining about counterfeit currency, I feel that they are hoist on their own petard. They learned it by watching you. I am honestly impressed that a system run almost entirely on public confidence can get away with so much chronic, endemic chicanery.
I was really hoping that India's little experiment in destroying its economy by removing larger-denomination cash would have resulted in a tiny bit of blood in the streets, pour encourager les autres. Without pushback, the trend will continue. So the world really, really needs a currency system that no one can effectively manipulate. Bitcoin gave me hope, but so far no cryptocurrency is anywhere near ready for universal adoption.
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.
It doesn’t really matter so long as they circulate like other currency though. Money is weird.
(Price fell to roughly the cost of production)
Except that it's all profit for the criminals counterfeiting 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.
At the Canadian/US mint, seemingly zero.
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_...
To my eye they look really shonky.
Edit II: A couple more examples:
http://www.cryst.co.uk/category/fake-pound-coins/
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
(found on this blog: http://blog.alism.com/fake-one-pound-coins-part-three/)
Those coins just look like they've been battered a bit too much, I just assume lots of coins get really rough treatment.
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?
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!
So I put my money in the drink machine and hit the coin return. Nothing happened. I tried a few times and figured the coin return was broken or that it was out of coins. The only thing in the machine was soda, which I can't drink if I don't want to trigger my acid reflux. But I bought one anyway since otherwise my money was "wasted", thinking I'd give the soda to a friend later.
Of course, once I bought the soda, the machine spat out all my change: 3 quarters and 2 dollar coins - now I finally had coins that I could buy food with. Naturally, the food machine didn't accept dollar coins. Most machines here don't, so no food for me.
Prior to about 2010, 5p and 10p coins really were thinner. They were changed from copper/nickel alloy (Cupronickel) to nickel-plated steel to reduce costs. But in order to maintain the same weight, the coins had to be made thicker.
Your second link made me laugh, both because the blogger guessed that I was admiring a specific photo and the gradual reveal of the true level of the incompetence on display.
http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
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.
Each euro country mints their own coins with different insignia, so people are used to 2 euro coins that what whatever figurehead.
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.
Obviously it's a bit different here, as the values are roughly the same, but I can see how that would happen as an honest mistake.
Helps that each of our coins are almost exactly the same size and weight for all common denominations.
Mostly we paid with cards, but my wife brought a few US$100 bills. It was silly to try to spend them for small purchases, but one night we had a CAD$60 dinner and we asked if we could use USD (hadn't been a problem anywhere else). They said yes, BUT they'd only accept it at 1:1. Obviously that's their prerogative, but it seemed silly to expect us to eat $18 or thereabouts, so instead they ate the credit card transaction fees. shrug
Granted, this is probably not bad policy in general because they're going to be even less expert at spotting fake US currency than US-based merchants are.
I'm in a city now and I've had people refuse to accept 2 dollar bills (which are rare, though absolutely legal tender).
You can buy it here: http://www.moneypads.com/products.html
"they are lovely looking coins, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the British One Pound coin [...] All of the One Lilangeni coin attributes are exactly the same as the British One Pound coin."
[1] https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces29731.html
[2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/One-Lilangeni-Coin-19...
Have received many in my time.
Machines don't like them
They seem to be not quite straight.
Probably easier to disperse the coins and hopefully not let them be traced back to you
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classi...
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97690/MIT-CSA...
* It's backed by usual pounds by the treasury, which means only they get to issue new coins (no public mining rewards).
* Court judgements must be able to block, reverse or force transactions. This means either the government gets a copy of all private keys, or simply has master keys for the system.
* UK government would probably want to attach names to all accounts, so new wallets could probably be only generated on some gov.uk site, or participating businesses like existing banks.
In the end, the blockchain is wasteful and inefficient when you could just have a big-ass server somewhere with an API.
You can certainly avoid that, just make it part of the protocol. You could create currency with such rules on top of Ethereum today. Court judgments simply become a part of trusted oracle.
BrexitCoin
Irrespective of that, it's pretty clear that Brexit will force Westminster into promising drastically increased levels of devolution not just to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but also to the major urban regions like Greater Manchester and Greater London that will reduce the de facto power of Westminster dramatically and allow the regions to drift even more apart in terms of differences in public policy.
At the same time there is a major split amongst those who considers themselves predominantly or only British or who considers themselves British first vs. those who predominantly see themselves as English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish first, and British second or not at all, with "Britishness" being weak and fractured.
Basically, to a lot of people living here, the UK means as little or even less than the EU, compared to other parts of their identity.
And a lot of the political discourse has been around how the elites ignore people. What people are about to find out is that in that respect the London elite were the ones ignoring them, not Brussels, and accordingly Brexit will not solve any of the problems they had in that respect.
Expect to see increasing upheaval and pressure for more power to be devolved from Westminster as a result. E.g. after the Brexit vote there was a brief flash of people talking about pushing for independence for London, and while that won't happen anytime soon if ever, expect to see those debates flash up again and lead to an actual (if miniscule) political movement at some point over the next couple of years.
I personally think that while the UK may persist in some form, the UK 10 years from now is reasonably likely to exclude Scotland, and the UK 30 years from now is likely to exclude Northern Ireland, and be more like a loose federation with massively devolved powers to Wales and several English regions and at least Manchester and London. Maybe even with increasing support for Welsh independence.
And we need all this new cruft because the current situation is insufficiently complex.
It's been nine months and starting the article 50 process is suppose to happen soon, but I have a feeling the UK will negotiate its way into the Economic Zone instead, keeping trade and immigration without work visas, while forfeiting their place on the EU parliament. Either that or they'll just ignore the will of the people and never leave.
Pretty sure the knowledge that there will be a new £1 coin has been known far longer than brexit has even been a thing.
That'd allow verifying every single new coin (unless it is damaged to the level of breaking the rfid chip, but I suppose that's not that easy).
It'd also enable tracking. I kinda regret that idea now. BUT if used responsibly, that can significantly reduce the counterfeiting by the means of somehow cloning the RFID chip (which wouldn't be simple if done properly -- there aren't any successful attacks on proper implementations of stuff like mifare desfire EV1/EV2 afaik). A coin was used on a market on london on 10am and with an ATM on Glasgow on 10:30am? Yeah, flag that coin down.
So you never know - but how would that work inside a metal coin?
That's a good point, I completely oversaw that.
[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US20110305919
That’s actually quite an old idea – most european countries’ IDs just have a normal smartcard in them, allowing normal signing and verification.
If the same hardware, then I guess the only different would be that the public keys would be associated with somthing else. But it's probably a huge patent mess to make this a standard for all countries and states.
I know two stores in my area that don't even support chip cards and this was within going in the past year. One has the readers, but they don't work. The other has no chip readers at all.
I always thought paper signing was a bit outdated, especially since schools don't teach cursive really. We spent like a hour on it, and then next topic!
But then if someone stole your ID, lost it, etc... They could sign for things... but people can forge your signature anyways... Maybe if the machine had a camera in it to take a selfie when you use the card, but a bit creepy in a way to.
In Germany this is actually used in all cigarette or alcohol dispensers.
You can pay via EC card or via cash, but you first need to verify age via EC card or ID.
EC cards (kinda like debit cards) and ID cards have two age verification functions, of which only one per minute can be called, these just verify if the account holder is > 16 or > 18.
So you press the button to get a bottle of beer, the system checks if you’re 16, you pay, and you get it.
Or you press the button to get a bottle of vodka, the system checks if you’re 18, you pay, and you get it.
All this is standard tech, supported by any normal RFID or card reader, and you can use the same reader for secure home banking, for verification, etc.
The Turkish Govt's new ID allows you to- no, it requires you to set a password. You are given an 8 character PIN code when you apply for the ID, and you can change it from the kiosks at the citizenship bureau. It allows between 4 and 16 characters (while I chose 16 myself, most people will choose a 4 character one :( ).
Plus, even if it gets stolen along with the password, technically the certificate can be revoked as soon as you report it, preventing forgery.
Here's mifare desfire EV2's leaflet that talks quite a bit about the security features it has: http://www.nxp.com/documents/leaflet/MIFARE-DESFire-EV2-Leaf...
(edit: when I say "cost" I mean the production cost)
Since most money is held in banks, electronic transactions, etc - the question is more the 'value of supporting this denomination in currency to the economy' than the cost of a coin.. Like of $100M USD worth of tax/federal reserve interest revenue is generated from $10M of $100 bills that cost $15M to produce, it's not really a loss, but a business expense...
Well, a pound coin is used more than once, and there is tax applied on every time it is used, so it'll pay off for itself in a relatively short timespan, imo. Plus, it pretty much beats counterfeits, so loss from that is gone too.
Problem with 1 kurus was that it wasn't used often, the monetary value was small and that it had no anti-counterfeit stuff. Also, people were melting it and selling it. You can't really sell a broken or write-protected rfid chip for much.
I suspect sooner or later someone is going to try radioactive currency.
I'm so old that when I went to uni we did a neutron activation of silver experiment in physics class because the half life of whatever isotope of silver was about a minute, so after an hour of lab you could put the coin back in your pocket. I don't know if they'd let college kids play with either a solid silver quarter from a few decades ago (probably worth a couple bucks today) OR a low level neutron source today. I could see picking some very obscure isotope of some obscure metal and dissolving it into the metal of the coin and if your xray metal analysis machine that scrapyards have (a kilobuck ish cost in a hand held device) detects the proper amount of iridium or whatever or a simple neutron activation followed by gamma spectrometer shows the right isotope in there...
Aside from spontaneous emissions and activation reactions, there are some weird cross sections out there. Whatever's irresistable to thermal neutrons thats used in reactors, probably a cadmium alloy, could be the core of a coin, and then blasting boring thermal neutrons that are semi-transparent to fakes but the cadmium core coins would look pitch black from eating all the neutrons. Or play the opposite game and make the coins out of pure neutron-transparent zirconium and only the neutron transparent coins are legit.
Make it look like a normal coin so people can trade by hand, but in any store interaction they could be checked.
>iSIS™ (Integrated Secure Identification Systems) is a direct derivation of covert and forensic features used in banknotes, comprising a unique additive technology – already used not only in banknotes but also in other industries such as fuel and perfume. This, however, is the first time it has been applied to coinage.
>The additive is incorporated into coins using The Royal Mint’s aRMour® full-plate technology and can be authenticated via high-speed automated detection. As it forms part of the electroplating process, it is not a surface coating and will not wear off over time.
Maybe it can be detected by spectral analysis of light like they do to see what gasses the sun is made of?
http://web.archive.org/web/20131119210211/http://www.currenc...
but it might give you some insights...
IIRC when copper-plated steel 1p and 2p coins were introduced (up until then they were bronze), they caused havoc with vending machines, whose manufacturers weren't forewarned.
"The pound won’t be around for much longer"
so the original sentence is sort of a pun. Maybe "around" is a local use of English.
http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=until
BTW: dodecahedron is the solid object, dodecagon is the 12-sided polygon. D&D style dice as currency would be pretty awesome but it might make it difficult to resolve dilemmas using pocket change.
edit: oh yeah I see it now
"security through obscurity" as a feature?
After all, your fakes don't need to be perfect; they just need to be good enough to enter the system without you getting caught every time.
(Which leads me to wonder - how do counterfeiters insert their fake coins in the monetary system? Where can you spend a lot of coin without arousing suspicion?)
-Coins sold at a discount to people who, perfectly aware they are fakes, use them for small purchases?
-Perhaps more likely - the customer is your friendly neighbourhood cigarette shop, which then mixes them in the change they give?
-Are some vending machines so bad at detecting fakes that you can use those (preferably ones with no security camera watching, which can be a challenge in the UK nowadays) to launder your fakes?
-Other?
Off to google I go. I really wonder how one can make a viable business model from getting fake coins into circulation.
I just looked over the £1 coins in my desk drawer (22!) - I found two dodgies. Perhaps I should bring them to the UK next time and ask in a bank - they may be just worn...
I'd be interested to find out about who makes the molds / dies and sets up the machines to manufacture these. I like to think its some eccentric retired machinist in a shed in the middle of the Yorkshire countryside :)
There are plenty of corner shops that'll happily sell you duty free tobacco amongst other non-legal things. I'm sure they'd be happy to take £100 worth of fake coins and mix them into their tills/takings/change if it only costs them £40. The difference can go into their pocket.
Obviously I have no idea of the veracity of that, or the accuracy of my memory of the potentially fictitious article.
For example, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommends:
> For external-facing servers, reconfigure service banners not to report the server and OS type and version, if possible
http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublic...
Presumably some people will know about it, but who? If banks are the only places that can detect a fake, for example, does that gain you anything?
I suppose you can do something like "ah, this bank is getting a lot of fake coins, which means they're probably getting injected somewhere in the local area, maybe let's interview some people who've been cashing them in and see if there are any businesses they all frequent". Might be valuable.
Something I've missed?
My understanding is there is some luminescence profile that is very easy to create from basic chemicals if you know the quantities of those chemicals. But that it is very difficult to establish the precise quantities from the luminescence profile. In effect, a "one-way chemical reaction hash".
If this security feature could only be reproduced using a bunch of PhD chemists and millions of dollars of lab equipment, then the security can be considered to be pretty obscure. Even the strongest key based encryption system is vulnerable to brute force attacks if you have enough computer power.
That took me completely by surprise. Is there really that much of a market in counterfeit coins? The profit margins just seem so modest relative to counterfeit bills.
For a merchant the cost of annoying a potentially unaware customer is more than the value of the coin that he will probably simply give back to another customer as change.
Try using an actual real 500€ bill anywhere else than Germany.
I paid for a 17K CHF car with 17 notes once. The Swiss trust their money completely.
If no one's checking for counterfeit coins, and the users themselves don't know they exist, it sounds like a pretty awesome opportunity for the counterfeiters.
Just take a look at the number of comments here saying the same thing as you - from a counterfeiter's perspective, it sounds pretty ideal.
Unless they can fool machines, it seems very inefficient.
Launder them through your other criminal activities.
"Hey, you want to be paid for all the drugs you've sold recently? You can have 500 in 'real' or 1,000 in fake notes + coins."
Also, this is not a case of the supplier trying to con its "client", but one of choice. "Would you prefer real or or more in fake ?"
I was given a South African 5 Rand coin in my change in Amsterdam (should have been a €2 coin):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:5-za-rand.JPG
Broke a 20 getting intoxicated in a bar/coffeeshop, then bought a kebab after on my walk back. Kebab shop was only place I got metal change that night.
I didn't notice until the next day when a coffee place threw a fuss when I used it to pay for my espresso.
I suspect they often mix them in for drunk tourists.
Adjusted only for changes in the CPI, Josh Tatum netted $121 in today's dollars every time he spent a gold-plated nickel.
(0) https://www.pcgs.com/News/The-Man-Who-Could-Stop-The-Mint
A relative who works in the industry told me he sees large numbers of counterfeit pound coins. I would guess counterfeiters might launder coins through machines. Or even, though I've never seen it, sell discount coins directly to gamblers? In any case machine recognition would be a high priority. The machines in question would be relatively unsophisticated ones with a thickness gauge and a 'ski jump' that effectively checks the weight.
One could probably go to a casino with a bag of fake coins, put 50 in each machine, and take any and all winnings. Some machines even pay out winnings in notes.
FOBT winnings are paid out via a receipt that is redeemed over the counter, so you can use them to convert coins into notes very easily. Gambling winnings are not subject to tax in the UK, so these machines are an extremely attractive money laundering method. Britain has around 9,000 betting shops, so it's easy to move around and avoid suspicion.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-mac...
Note that this was a great way to get millions of coins into circulation back in the early 2000s, not so easy now.
Take the amount of £1 coins in circulation. Sum the value. Divide by 30. Equals the market in counterfeit coins.
From http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/circulation-coin-...
£1 are 1,671.328 £m / 30 = 55.71 £m
The market in counterfeit coins is therefore over 55 million pounds. This is, however the cumulative, total value of the market and not per year.
You might buy new pounds as "secure" coins, but you'll probably some percentage of their value the next day...
On one hand finally getting clarity might be good news in that some people who have held back might spend more once the uncertainty of the immediate reaction is out of the way. On the other hand for a lot of people it makes things definite and will cause more cautious spending patterns, and there's still plenty of other uncertainty.
It also starts the clock, which will make people speculate about the timing.
I haven't the faintest clue how that will make traders respond. What I do know is that because I don't have the faintest clue how it will make people respond, I'm acting accordingly cautiously, and have cut my spending considerably since the referendum, and I know many others in the same situation, and indeed the UK has a whole has seen consumer debt levels drop substantially.
All this to say that it is foolish to assume that it boils down to whether or not the actual event itself is expected or not.
thankfully you aren't the majority; we really would have had a recession if everyone had cut their spending
I for one thinks that recession or not, a lot of people are setting themselves up for major pain once interest rates start moving up again and would be best served by doing what they can to cut down on spending.
At the moments large parts of the handling of the UK economy appears to be based on trying to push problems ahead of us in the hope that things will start looking rosier some day. Instead it's looking scarier and scarier.
[1] https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2017/02/consumer-spendi...
[2] http://myinforms.com/en-gb/a/184905009-consumer-spending-gro...
[3] https://sputniknews.com/business/201701201049832161-uk-retai...
brexit itself doesn't change the fact there's a short term business cycle driven by credit and low interest rates
> At the moments large parts of the handling of the UK economy appears to be based on trying to push problems ahead of us in the hope that things will start looking rosier some day.
capitalism is based entirely on eternal exponential growth, which is clearly not sustainable, there's nothing UK specific about this
Consumer demand and confidence largely comes from how safe people feel in their jobs and whether or not they get raises, not statistics. I'm sure there's some feedback, but my own cautious spending is a direct result of knowing of direct threats to a substantial number of jobs, and seeing the consequences of e.g. potential clients pulling back on spending. I'm not very worried about my own income, but the only reason I'm not very worried is that my disposable income is high enough that I can sustain drops without being affected much.
Meanwhile e.g. my ex. has to deal with knowing that hundreds of jobs where she works will be cut (and no, that's not rumours - she works in HR and has direct knowledge of the plans) as a consequence of Brexit. If the negotiations goes badly, it will be several times that.
That is the kind of things that's causing consumer confidence to soften.
> brexit itself doesn't change the fact there's a short term business cycle driven by credit and low interest rates
No, but it has directly affected that starting to come to and end because of softening consumer confidence.
> capitalism is based entirely on eternal exponential growth, which is clearly not sustainable, there's nothing UK specific about this
No, but there is something UK specific about currently being in a situation where the government has chosen to drastically cut public spending at a time when low salary growth has left people using low credit as a means to keep the party going, and are then suddenly hit by events that cause a great deal of uncertainty over their ability to continue to service debt.
http://www.royalmint.com/shop/h/hisoneth
Unfortunately it doesn't work as well for the commemorative coin dated 1937, which is worth closer to £2.
Developing a new coin for hundreds of millions of people in daily use is a big task, it’s easier to start with a subset of 80 million potential users to demonstrate feasibility, and test.
But so far only as collector coins.
However, most central banks do that on a much larger scale at the moment to get that inflation and it doesn't really work (the Bank of England has stopped that though).
If Scotland votes to leave it will be to remain in the EU debate after Indyref1 led me to conclude that Scotland would have to petition the EU to join as a new member instead of inheriting the UK's membership, and the EU requires new members to adopt the Euro... so if Indyref2 passes then they'll have the Euro.
I've written elsewhere that I reckon other criminal channels might be in use.
If you offer your street level drug dealers a choice of 1,000 pounds in "real" money or 2,000 in "fake," (or a mixture of them both) that'd probably do the job.
I'm working off the assumption that there's the exact same problem with distributing drugs.
Like, what would you do with a kilo or two of cocaine just lying around? Get many smaller dealers to handle the problem for you instead and make their money along the way.
If you also have some fake money lying around, I can't see any reason why you wound't try to combine the two.
It works if you need to employ petty criminals for jobs other than sales, though.
Also from wiki:
> The new design is intended to make counterfeiting more difficult, via an undisclosed hidden security feature, called 'iSIS' (Integrated Secure Identification Systems). [1]
Huh.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_pound_(British_coin)
The sides are not straight; they are curved outwards. The curve is defined by an arc of a circle whose center is the opposite corner on the coin.
It's a neat class of shapes! My dive into them came while researching the rotary Wankel engine (rotors are roughly Reuleaux triangles)
To apply the principle of Reuleaux geometry to a regular shape with an even number of vertices, you'd make arcs tangent to the point in question, extending in a curve that increases the coin's diameter as the arc gets longer. The arc would come to an end in a point midway to the next point, where it would intersect with that point's arc. You'd have a star-shaped solid where all geometry external to the inscribed circle are tapered triangles. Kind of neat, but it would be tough to put through a vending machine.
If I'm not mistaken it has to have an odd number of sides, but it has 12.
The sides looks like they might be very slightly curved in order to facilitate rolling. But it not being of constant width could still make life more difficult for vending machines etc.
How much longer will we be using coins for?
I bet there's an RFID in each coin that uniquely identifies each one. If true, it'd also let them (or a thief!) identify the total value of the coins jingling in your pocket.
> Approximately one in thirty £1 coins in circulation is a counterfeit.
That seems incredibly high! Anyone have comparable stats for US dollar bills or 1 Euro coins?
> The legal tender status of the round £1 coin will be withdrawn on 15th October 2017. From this date shops will no longer accept these coins, but you will still be able to take them to your bank. We would encourage you to use your coins or return them to your bank before 15th October.
Six-months is a pretty short window for something like this.
What prevents a shop from accepting the coins after Oct 15th and then they take it to the bank?
Also, how does the 1/30 fraud number impact the returns of the current pound notes?
The law, which only allows individuals to exchange the old coins after that date. Yes, shopkeepers could change their bills for old pounds and then deposit them in person to their current accounts at the local branch, but if I'm a shopkeeper then I probably have better things to do with my time.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/19/cost-new-pound...
Seems like there are £45m worth of counterfeit coins in circulation, but the switch may cost over £100 million.
____
EDIT: The percent of fake coins in circulation appears to be in flux, which makes me wonder what methods they use to estimate the fakes in circulation, if they use controls like injecting known fakes into the count to see if they are spotted, if the sample is truly random, the maths is correct, etc.:
1% 2004 [1]
3.03% May 2014 [2]
2.55% May 2015 [2]
Of note is that the Royal Mint states in the 2016 annual report that the last survey for fakes was in May 2015, but the report was issued in July 2016, which means at least as of that date they failed to do the annual survey; or at least publish the results.[3]
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/10707540/...
[2] http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
[3] http://www.royalmint.com/~/media/Files/AnnualReports/ar_2015...
But I would guess from a public relation perspective, asking a whole population to replace their coins just to make it cheaper and easier for banks is a harder sell that arguing security.
The cost of changing comes primarily from businesses having to update vending machines, coin counting machines, etc (as well as increased production costs due to the new security features.)
But this switch has been planned for many years, so businesses have had a long time to prepare.
By comparison, the new, smaller coins are much harder to grasp and the new denomination (2kr) is hard to tell apart from the new (1kr). The new notes are similarly hard to tell apart, as they all i) have the same height, and ii) use similar (pastel) colors.
"Never attribute to malice what you can blame on stupidity", but it almost feels like they are making the new cash hard to use on purpose.
Is this not already true? When my laptop was stolen, I was advised "don't bother reporting it to the police".
Given the expense of rolling out the new coin, it probably makes more sense from a economic and moral point of view to spend money investigating these crimes rather than preventing them.
Meanwhile the entire currency is debased annually by failing to include land prices into the inflation calculations, despite most credit creation being against land.
This debases GBP for workers every year. Therefore propping up confidence is vital.
(am brit)
We also don't know anything about the volume of forged coins withdrawn from the market each month. If detection at pubs, grocery stores, etc. is poor, then fake coins enter the market at will and are detected only when merchants present their cash to banks. That's annoying for everyone, and it's possible to come up with scenarios in which each year sees 2x or even 5x the introduction of fake coins, with many of them staying in circulation for only a few months but causing damages anyway.
In either of these scenarios, clamping down now on forgery is economically prudent, even if the 100 > 45 comparison doesn't reveal the true cost.
While I see the value of failsafe money (except it really isn't) I think the returns are diminishing...
If a one-time cost of £100m will remove the fake coins and prevent new fakes, it's well worth the price tag.
The old £1 Coin was relatively easy and cheap to counterfeit and the counterfeits were practically perfect (I've had a few over the years, they're REALLY hard to spot unless you know what you're looking for, just Google "spot a fake £1" for some examples of how good they are).
Seems like many of the counterfeit coins come from abroad, in particular countries with a much lower cost of living and where counterfeiting foreign currency may be ignored. There's also a huge market in pushing counterfeit money onto foreign exchanges in other countries.