It all depends how much the counterfeiter is willing to pay. A serious crook, with lots of cash, can hire other crooks to do bang-up counterfeiting work making fake valuable coins. Such coins are almost impossible to tell apart from genuine pieces. Professional authenticators must be called in to separate the good from the bad. This is becoming more and more a problem in modern coin collecting.

But the crooks know better than to spend too much money. There are plenty of inexperienced people who will buy counterfeit coins even if they only resemble a real coin. This is the case with our subject coin.

If you have a genuine gold sovereign, there is no need to read further. Instead, click to our appraisal page on the subject.

Most counterfeits are difficult to spot unless you have a genuine article available and you can do a side-by-side evaluation. A cursory examination quickly exposes dramatic differences in the pattern. This is ratified by the soft, mushy appearance of the fake, as well as (as the inquirer points out) the wrong date on the coin. By 1915, King George appears on sovereigns, not Queen Victoria.



Counterfeit coins are worth zero.