Queen Victoria Shilling - The Worst Fake I Have Seen

It is a queen victoria shilling fake not sure if its 1840s or 1860s from uk . I have sevral original Victoria shillings what are made with 900 silver this is a gram lighter in weight .I think um not sure on base metal on this one maybe steel or pewter

Don't forget: a counterfeit coin only has to fool one person, once, and it's "mission accomplished" for the counterfeiter. A counterfeiter knows little, and cares less, what the counterfeit looks like after that single use. They certainly don't care what it will look like in 150 years time. This coin probably looked a lot more like an actual shilling when it was first made.

Though I would concur that it seems to be at least partially "unfinished"; the big blob of metal at the base, especially on the obverse, really should have been broken off before being spent. It's presumably a cast counterfeit, and perhaps this one was discarded as being a bad job, too much effort to either try to clean up and look presentable, or to recycle. Or maybe the crooks got rumbled and scattered, and the counterfeiter never got to came back to finish the job.

It's supposed to be a coin. It is in the design of an early shilling of Queen Victoria (1837-1886).

In the light of this object, I've been doing some interesting reading. In 1862, a four-volume treatise on the life and times of London's underclass, "London Labour and the London Poor" - kind of an anthropological examination of deepest, darkest London - included a chapter on counterfeiters, or "coiners". This was the age when counterfeiters, if caught and found guilty, would have likely been transported to Australia. The following points may be of interest.

- The London districts of Westminster, Clerkenwell, The Borough, Lambeth, Drury Lane, Seven Dials, Lisson Grove and "other low neighbourhoods" were known hotbeds of coining.
- Moulds were made of plaster of paris. A genuine coin would be washed clean, then smeared with a thin layer of grease so the plaster doesn't stick to the coin. Several impressions would be made in the mould, so multiple coins could be cast at once. The plaster had to be thoroughly dry before casting, otherwise the mould exploded on contact with hot metal. Moulds could be re-used multiple times before becoming unusable.
- All silver coins were typically counterfeited - crowns, halfcrowns, shillings and sixpences were the most common. A mixture of small and large coins on the same mould was the most stable configuration.
- Raw metal for the fake coins was usually pewter, often from melted-down "britannia metal" spoons.
- "Coiners" were often a two-man team, or, far more often than not, a husband-and-wife team, with the man holding the mould clamped together with tongs, while the woman poured in the molten pewter. One person doing the job single-handedly was almost unheard of, but a larger gang could be responsible. One anecdote related in the book states how a pair of police officers sprung what they thought was going to be a small husband-and-wife coining operation, only to be jumped on by a gang of five hefty men, plus a couple of women.
- Once removed from the mould and cooled, the "gat" - the casting sprue - had to be clipped off with a pair of tin-snips, then filed down flat. This clearly hasn't happened yet with the OP's coin.
- Primitive silver electroplating was known at the time, and often employed by the counterfeiters to give their coins a realistic look. The electroplating solution contained cyanide, as well as nitric and sulfuric acid, so was probably not entirely safe to be around. As a final treatment, the plated coins were often given a fake tarnish using a mixture of lampblack and machine oil.
- The people who made the coins weren't usually the same people actually using, or "uttering", the coins. The typical black market going rate for buying fake coins, between the coiners and the criminal gangs who worked with them, was one genuine penny per shilling-face-value of fakes, with bulk discounts usually available.
- Coiners, on being discovered by the police, typically went to great lengths to try to destroy the evidence - smashing moulds, and tossing any unfinished coins back into the melting pot. Constables were often assaulted by having vats of acid, cyanide or molten metal hurled at them. It seems likely to me that the OP's coin may have been lost in the affray of a police bust. It probably wasn't deliberately buried, as burying coins takes time that a coiner wouldn't have had in the middle of a raid.

Very interesting indeed.



to the CCF!

As you can see I have cleaned it up a bit and had it tested for silver , and the the coin is silver ant the face of the coin has a thin sheet attached to the coin as you can see on the side picture but this sheet has been soldered or pressed to the original coin . I'm not sure why they would do this , maybe at a later date they took a less valuable date and try to replace it with a valuable date as you can see in first pic 1850 then when cleaned 1846 .