The Pound In Your Pocket,

may not be worth anything at all! I have seen a few fake £1 coins in the UK over the years, pretty poor copies they were too, but new counterfeiting gangs are getting more adept at fooling the public, look at the examples above, one is fake one is genuine, record numbers of fake £1 coins in circulation could force the Royal Mint to scrap the entire denomination and reissue it, there are now about 41million counterfeits, or one in every 36 coins in current use, it is thought that the proportion of fakes has tripled in the last decade, not that it is any consolation but other countries have had the same counterfeiting problem occur with there coinage, the five rand coin in 2004 was reissued after taxi-drivers and shopkeepers in South Africa started to refuse to accept them, fakes were just two per cent of all coins, compared with 2.81 per cent with the British £1, shoppers tend to only realise they have a fake coin when it is rejected by a parking meter or vending machine, which contains devices to monitor whether the metal composition of the coins are correct, however, at least half the fakes are now so good they pass these tests, so will the £1 coin be replaced? Robert Matthews, the former Queen's Assay Master at the Royal Mint, the most senior coin tester in the country, said: 'If the number of fakes keeps increasing at this rate, there will have to come a point when the Treasury makes the decision whether to remint or not.' as one commenter noted, 'bring back pounds shillings and pence! decimal money is foreign and was forced on us by Europe, if the good Lord had wanted us to use metric money he would have given us ten fingers and toes!' well yes, just out of interest the real coin is the one below.