Check your sofa… £120MILLION worth of old pound coins are still missing

More than 120million old £1 coins are still missing – nearly three years after they stopped being legal tender.

Royal Mint chiefs say £1.58billion of the round coins were returned to be swapped for new ones – but 122,000,000 were never sent back.

The new 12-sided coins were introduced in October 2017 as they were harder to counterfeit. Officials also revealed nearly 1,500,000 fake £1s were among the coins returned to be melted down.

Don’t throw away any old coins you find down the back of the sofa, though – the Mint says round £1 coins can still be deposited at most high street banks.

A Royal Mint official said: ‘The old £1 coin could not be readily distinguished from the genuine coin, which is why a new coin was introduced.’

There were about 1.7bn round £1 coins in circulation at the start of the six-month transition period in March 2017.   

The new £1 coin is described by the Mint as the most ‘secure in the world’ and has a string of anti-counterfeiting details, including a hologram, and micro-sized lettering inside both rims.

It also has material inside which can be detected when electronically scanned by coin-counting or payment machines.

The Royal Mint expanded its offering last year by turning to jewellery making.

More than half of all payments were made by card last year – leaving the UK ‘inadvertently’ prepared for the coronavirus lockdown.