Posts by Change Checker
This £5 banknote just sold for £4,150!
One of the new polymer £5 banknotes featuring Winston Churchill recently sold for a whopping £4,150 at a Bank of England charity auction on Monday 3rd October.
The banknote was only expected to fetch £800-£1200 at the charity event but it actually went for 830 times its face value!
This banknote sold for an extraordinary £4,150 at the charity auction.
Just last month we reported that banknotes with the serial number beginning with AA01 were selling online for hundreds of pounds. The banknotes which were released into circulation on September 13th are still catching the public’s attention with collectors looking to keep hold of the notes while they are still in good condition.
The first batch of banknotes from the presses carry a serial number starting AA01, followed by a six-digit number. There are 999,999 new fivers with the AA01 prefix and these are the ones selling for vast sums.
Winston Churchill features on the new Polymer £5 Banknotes
The £5 note was lot one at the event held in London and carried the serial number AA01 000017, making it the lowest available to the public according to auctioneers Spink.
A lot of bids came through online and it is thought that a lot of interest in these banknotes came from across the pond because Churchill was a well-known face over in the US.
The Bank of England Charity event raised a total of £203,820 with the money going to three worthy charities which were chosen by staff at the Bank of England.
A total of 601 banknotes were up for sale at the event and every banknote sold well over its estimate sale price.
Are these the most sophisticated fake £2 coins?
£2 coins were introduced in 1998 to prevent against counterfeiting and were the first bi-metallic coins to enter circulation in the UK.
£2 coins were first issued into circulation in 1998
Made with two different metal components, £2 coins are very complicated to manufacture and very difficult to counterfeit… or so we believed.
As we know, 1 in 30 £1 coins are fake. The Royal Mint are so concerned, they’ll be introducing a new 12-sided £1 coin in March which is billed to become the most secure circulating coin in the world.
But, this means that counterfeiters are now turning their attention to the £2 coin.
To begin with, early £2 counterfeit coins were just a lump of led tin alloy, spray painted to look like a genuine £2 coin and were easy to tell apart from the real thing.
Now, they’re becoming a lot harder to spot, even by professionals. Some fake £2 coins are even being accepted in vending machines and car parking machines.
So how many fakes are out there and who’s responsible?
Fraudsters require a highly sophisticated press to produce bi-colour coins. It’s thought that there are hundreds of thousands of fake £2 coins in circulation and is definitely a form of organised crime.
Can you spot one?
There are a few simple ways to tell if you have a fake £2 coin. One of the most obvious ways to spot a fake is by comparing the quality of the writing on the edge inscription to a genuine coin and also checking that the edge inscription matches the design.
However there are still some fake £2 coins that pass the two tests above.
According to experts, fakes can usually be detected by the weight. Genuine £2 coins should weigh 12g, but these remarkable new counterfeit £2 coins are also weighing in at 12g.
Each UK denomination is made up of different compositions which are agreed between The Royal Mint and HM Treasury but the exact amount is kept top secret.
The only way to find out for definite if the coin is real or fake is for it to be x-rayed by a special machine which gives a reading of all the different elements that have gone into the coin.
So should we be increasing the security of the £2 coins to make it harder for them to be counterfeited?
Let us know your thoughts via Facebook, Twitter or leave us a comment below.
Is it time to scrap the Penny?
Pennies have been around in Britain for over a thousand years, but is it now time for the penny to be dropped?
Mark Carney, Bank of England Governor, thinks it is inevitable that Britain will follow countries such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia and scrap the penny.
As Governor of the Bank of Canada he oversaw the withdrawal of the 1p coin equivalent and claims the process was really successful among Canadians.
Not only was the 1 cent coin unmissed by Canadians and reduced the cost of transactions for both businesses and the Government, a massive $11m was saved in the first year by discontinuing the production of the coins.
But are we ready to say farewell to the British Penny?
The Penny has been around for over 1,200 years.
The Penny was one of the earliest British coins, first minted in the 8th century AD.
The silver penny became universal throughout Britain in 959 and until the reign of Henry III in 1234 it was one of the only denominations minted.
The Penny even survived decimalisation in 1971 making it one of the only denominations that was kept during the changeover.
Although it’s fair to say that pennies are rarely used to buy anything, it’s thought that an estimated 11.2 billion pennies are currently in circulation.
What about Ireland’s ‘Rounding’ Initiative?
In October 2015, Ireland lauched its ‘Rounding’ initiative. It aimed to reduce the use of 1 cent and 2 cent coins by rounding the total amount of any bill paid by cash on a voluntary basis up or down to the nearest 5 cent mark.
So far, 126 million coins have been taken out of circulation. So could Britain follow in the same footsteps as Ireland?
As with any coin, the loss of the penny would be a blow to coin collectors everywhere. But we must remember that these changes are part of what makes coin collecting so interesting. Designs change, new coins come into existence and some coins will inevitably disappear.
So should we get rid of the Penny? Let us know in our poll: