London Mint Office £5 coin con

EssexGirl

A leaflet about a "New Queen Elizabeth II 80th Birthday £5 coin" dropped through my door this morning. It's a limited edition, exchange £5 for £5 with no postage, issued by the London Mint Company. I thought it looked like a nice buy for my son as he is 8 and likes to collect shiny things!

Until I remembered that the ROYAL mint make coins in the UK.

Reading the small print, turns out that the coin is only legal tender on Tristan da Cunha, an island somewhere in the Atlantic ocean. It has nothing to do with the Royal Mint whatsoever. I can imagine a fair few people falling for this one, being a major royal anniversary.
One of the major newspapers has done a scam article about this.

Hope this helps someone!

Jazzy_B

Theyve still got the official £5 coin at post offices. It's legal tender too.

EssexGirl

Flippin wish I could........

Bob_the_Builder_5

The Royal Mint has been privatised - so they're no better than Franklin Mint

Kilty_2

EssexGirl wrote:

A leaflet about a "New Queen Elizabeth II 80th Birthday £5 coin" dropped through my door this morning. It's a limited edition, exchange £5 for £5 with no postage, issued by the London Mint Company. I thought it looked like a nice buy for my son as he is 8 and likes to collect shiny things!

Until I remembered that the ROYAL mint make coins in the UK.

Reading the small print, turns out that the coin is only legal tender on Tristan da Cunha, an island somewhere in the Atlantic ocean. It has nothing to do with the Royal Mint whatsoever. I can imagine a fair few people falling for this one, being a major royal anniversary.
One of the major newspapers has done a scam article about this.

Hope this helps someone!

:eek: They had these leaflets in my local Clydesdale Bank branch :eek:

Or at least I think it was the same, could you possible scan it?

EssexGirl

^ Sorry, the nice men from the council took it away with all the rest of the junk mail to be recycled.

libitina_2

I had one of those the other day. Looks a bit like one of the new fangled payslips.
Well spotted op.

rdwarr

To clear up any confusion:

£5 coins that are legal tender in the UK look like this:


and the ones that only work in Tristan da Cunha (once you've got there) look like this:

Poppycat

This was mentioned on BBC radio 4 program you and yours last week. The company has no connection to the Royal Mint although they claim they do sell UK coins too. The coin isnt legal tender in UK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_da_Cunha

trisontana

There is also an article about this in the August edition of the Moneywise magazine written by Tony Hetherington. It goes on to say that forget any hope that these things will increase in value and become collector's items over the years. These things never do.

RalphyJ

I am a collector and have bought the Queen’s 80th Birthday collection from The London Mint Office. It is not an issue for me that the coin is not legal tender in the UK – it’s a collector’s coin, I didn’t purchase it with the view to spending it. The fact that is not legal tender in the UK does not impact on the coins collectable value, so it makes no difference at all if I want to trade or sell it to another collector.