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/)

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.

You can get answers on so many topics on HN...

Those coins just look like they've been battered a bit too much, I just assume lots of coins get really rough treatment.

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.

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.

Probably easier to disperse the coins and hopefully not let them be traced back to you

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.

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.

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.

At the Canadian/US mint, seemingly zero.

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.

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.

"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...

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

http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...

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.

Have received many in my time.

Machines don't like them

They seem to be not quite straight.