Mistery 1919 Sovereign Georgev Not Mint

I don't think it is a fake piece I have made several checks and they look good

The date side in particular seems to lack detail in the center.



to the CCF!

Even if counterfeit maybe it's still gold? There's counterfeit Canadian 5$ coins made in the 60's in gold I believe.Looks off to me but hopefully is gold

In 1919 in Middle East the British Sovereign was used as a trusted currency.
There were a lot of locally made counterfeits circulating.
Some of them were made of a higher gold fineness than the standard Sovereign, so that they could be accepted for trading.

There were no official London Mint sovereigns bearing the date of 1919, without a mint mark.
What you have here is a counterfeit, quite possibly in finer than the 22 ct gold from which London Mint sovereigns were made. It would still have been trusted for trading in the full knowledge that it is a counterfeit,
IF the gold purity could be trusted.

The international image of the Sovereign as a bullion trading coin came into question.
The British Government took the decision to produce huge numbers of sovereigns dated 1925, and deliberately made them as accessible as possible to Middle eastern markets, and managed to eliminate questionable coins from circulation.

"Jeweller's imitations" of sovereigns are quite common. They were (and still are) made by jewellers in the Middle East in order to sell gold in a form that people are familiar with. "Beirut copies" are so called because a large number of them were made in Lebanon back in the 1960s and, like your coin, often use fictitious date-mintmark combinations (perhaps so the gold-seller can easily tell which coins in their inventory are the replicas). More modern examples, so-called "Dubai replicas", tend to copy genuine coins but are distinguished by the presence of a maker's mark indicating the metal purity, like the one in this thread and this thread.

These jeweller's imitations are much more profitable if the jeweller makes inferior coins but can sell their products for the full sovereign price. More often than not, these "coins" are either lighter in weight than a genuine sovereign, or of lower purity (21k instead of 22k). Many Beirut copies are under-fineness, sometimes as low as .720 fine. In Dubai, the largest gold market in the world today, it is legal to sell imitation gold coins so long as they are made of gold and bear a correct mark of fineness. The ones marked with "22" (the correct fineness for a sovereign) are probably underweight; the ones marked with "21" are probably the correct weight.

This has been discussed in previous threads... counterfeit sovereigns are readily available, even today, in the Middle East. I was flying through Dubai a few years ago and noted in one of the duty free stores that a Sovereign dated 1917 and bearing no mint mark was available for bullion value... When I asked the sales clerk, it was freely admitted that it wasn't minted in London but since it was legitimate in every aspect (size, fineness, image) with the exception of provenance, it was legal to sell in Dubai as long as it wasn't represented as being minted in London in 1917.

A legitimate 1917 Sovereign will command thousands of pounds in just about any condition... The concern with this practice is a well intentioned but ill informed purchaser may purchase this (or a 1919) as an important date for them (birthday of a parent or grandparent) and then when it is passed on to future generations the provenance does not go with it.

For this reason, be careful with Sovereigns... They are great to collect but risky. Most coin catalogues from the UK (Seaby/Spink or Coincraft) refer to the prevalence of forgeries of these dates.

@Sap & @Sel_69l. Of interest, the 1917 I was looking at did not have a 21ct or 22ct counterstamp. It was the date and the price that had me questioning the provenance...