i've been thinking...............

those £1 coins,
so many home-made ones in circulation,
must be costing the taxpayer an absolute fortune.
why has the £1 coin not not been withdrawn before now?

it cannot/must not continue imo.

wouldn't have thought it was worth counterfeiting personally.

can see the point of making 20s,
or 50s,
but £1s

oh well.

rant over.

It's a good point, though, Eric. If you can spend a fiver making a spot on dodgy £20, then there's a chance of making 4x the money in one fell swoop. The same fiver spend might be doubled again to make a similar £50 and the margins would be 5x. It'd be ample for a failure rate of even 1 in 2 if you could do it.

The £20 would be where the value is at because slightly more than half of all bank notes in circulation are now £20 notes but in recovered forgeries, 95% (yes, 95%) are £20 notes - it is the undisputed king of cash. A decade or so back, it was different altogether - forgery was more or less even across denominations at £5, £10 and £20. The bottom two became less value as new notes were introduced (Darwin and Fry) needing forgeries of the new design to be created (and in terms of circulation, the fiver is increasing rare). The Darwin is a bit back in vogue at the minute because of the Elgar being taken out of circulation leaving only the Adam Smith new style as the £20 (so meaning you can only forge one "face" rather than two). £50 are always subject to great scrutiny (you'd expect at least two-and-a-half times worth) so there would be more challenge in forging a Houblon and you aren't looking for challenge as a forger - you're looking for value and successful turnover.

The only reason I could see for someone making dud £1 coins is that they are cheaper again to knock out - if they were two or three pence a pop, maybe even double that, they are easily passed without scrutiny in places where there are transactions that are pretty much solely cash and turned over quickly - top of my head, I'd say pubs, newsagents, buses, betting shops, even supermarkets at non-automatic tills. Ease of opportunity over face value and a profit margin of over ten times and possible up to thirty times per coin passed.

Quite interesting to see the list the BoE have of suggestions for future notes suggested by people. I'd have Sir Frank Whittle myself but I like the idea of Sir Robert Watson-Watt as well (he was the bloke who worked in early RADAR if memory serves - that would be ironic in detection of anything, including forgery)

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/about/banknote_names.pdf

Spectacular list of living people who should never be on a banknote, meanwhile...

Sir Jimmy Savile OBE 1926 Television Presenter
Sir Jonathan Miller 1934 Neurologist/Theatre Director/Presenter
Michael Parkinson 1935 Television Presenter
Terry Wogan 1938 Radio/Television broadcaster
John Cleese 1939 Comedian/Actor
Richard Dawkins 1941 Ethologist/Evolutionary Biologist
Stephen Hawking 1942 Physicist
Mick Jagger 1943 Musician
Richard Branson 1950 Entrepreneur
Linda Smith 1958 2006 Comedian/President of the British Humanist Association
The Beatles - - Musicians All four?
Princess Diana 1961 1997 Member of the Royal Family Not a fucking chance
Robbie Williams 1974 Singer/Song-writer
Michael Vaughan 1974 Cricketer
David Beckham 1975 Footballer
Jonny Wilkinson

Glaring exception if they're putting up Jonathan Miller as a neurologist, then Roger Bannister for the same. No-one else will ever break the four minute mile first, but that's not all he did.

i watched the counterfiters the other night , enjoyed it