1996 1 Pound Coin - Upside Down Words?

This really annoys me on ebay. You are quite correct in stating that the edge inscription is applied to the blanks before the coins are struck, and the blanks are then placed into a hopper that feeds them between the dies. This applies to most of the 1983-2016 £1 coins and most £2 coins since 1997, apart from the 'Bridges' series of £1 coins and the London Underground £2 coins which had symbols on the edge.

Unfortunately some people seem to have got it into their heads that the edge inscription should always be legible when the Queen's head is uppermost, and that any coin with the writing the other way up (as you say, 50% of the production) is an error... The story got picked up by a clueless reporter on one of the UK's tabloid papers, and, despite many attempts to debunk it, it just continues to run and run...

Yes - that is another regular con. The inserts are put into the blanks before the coin is struck, so there is no way this "error" can occur in the striking process, only by criminals knocking it out and putting it back the wrong way round.

Ah.. so it's the same idiots that plague Gumtree in Australia. The first $2 coin in Oz had the initials HH. The initials were dropped for most subsequent mintages. Being the first $2 coin to replace the $2 note meant a mintage of 140-160 million, so about 6 coins for every australian. Some clueless reporter or a youtube joker mentioned this as a rare coin worth thousands so now gumtree is full of ads for "rare" 1988 $2 coin with HH initials going for $1000-1500. It makes me want to someone. I do believe ebay's and Gumtree's free listings encourage many of the scammers as it costs them nothing. And yes, ebay doesn't give a toss so long as they get their selling fees.
The flipping of the insert reminds me of another scam with the coloured coins. People use acetone to remove the ink and then advertise it as a rare error where the ink wasn't applied during minting.

UPDATE - It seems the $2 HH scam is reaching new levels of stupidity on ebay! It's not even a good grade!
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/RARE-Au...224383731621