Counterfeit - 1 Pound - Elizabeth II 3rd portrait; English Lions

The round pound's notorious vulnerability to counterfeiting became a genuine public policy crisis by the mid-2000s, with the Royal Mint estimating that roughly 1 in 36 coins in circulation was fake by 2013. Many of those forgeries traced back to the 1990s production runs, when the tooling required to produce a convincing copy became accessible to organized criminal networks. This specific type — the English Lions reverse paired with the Maklouf portrait — was among the most replicated, largely because it remained in circulation long enough for fakes to accumulate across multiple years of commerce.

Weight and edge lettering were the period's primary detection points. Many forgeries failed on the edge inscription depth before anything else.