1901 Half Sovereign Real Or Fake ?

Thank you for the update. Composition shows it is fake. The british never deviated from the gold content.

There are very very good fakes. I once returned a sovereign only on suspicion because of weak details. Everything else was correct including composition.

Half sovereigns are the worse. Genuine half sovereigns have such weak detail that it is hard to evaluate that way, from looks.

They're melting at $227 USD tonight. While I don't have a good source for cheap ones there are ebay completely listings for July 2023 that are around $250 delivered (not sure if that's Canada though).

Seems like a lot of effort to make about $120 at today's prices. But I guess if you can crank out a lot of them.

Interesting thread and thanks to all lending their expertise.

The weak details was concerning but comparing it to ebay offerings, there are plenty there that don't look so hot. Could a good portion of those be fake too?

So the only way to be definitive is to use the fancy jewelers machine? Is the amount of Au missing and replaced by Cu/Ag, be detected by size measurement?

This is a density test aswell forgot to upload this but when I saw this I knew something was up