Reports of counterfeit banknotes plummet after shift to new fivers and tenners - MSE News

1000+ a month is basically nothing anyway. That's about one for every two bank branches and Post Offices in the country.

Anecdotally, £5s and £10s were never the most counterfeited notes to start with - they're too low value, too frequently used and you'll almost never have a wad of them to try and lose a counterfeit or two in. The real treat is going to be when the £20s go over to polymer, those tend to be more counterfeited than any other.

JezR wrote: »

From the Bank of England's own figures in 2017 there were 43,000 forged £10 notes discovered and 1000 £5 notes. By 2018 this had decreased to 8,000 and 1,000 but these were nearly all of older paper notes. The number of £20 notes discovered had gone up a bit from 398k to 416k (plus 36k of £50 notes). However, back in 2012 there were 564k of forged £20 notes.

Yep. Further confirms what I say about about £20s. Shops get themselves worked up over £50s and Scottish notes (much to the upset of people who receive them!) but statistically they're far more likely to get handed a dodgy £20 (I handled plenty of counterfeit £20s in my cashier job over 8 years but I could count the number of spotted fake £50s or RBS/BOS/Clydesdale notes on one hand with fingers to spare).

Counterfeiting is dying anyway as more people get wise to it, security features improve and the counterfeit notes get easier to detect. As fewer people use cash in general, there's also less of a "surface area" for passing off fake notes. Polymers will almost completely kill it off as they're expensive to produce - far from just hoping you get the colours and shiny bits right, you also have to replicate a whole new material and set of physical attributes.

Push payment fraud and card fraud is far more profitable, less risky and doesn't involve actually producing physical items. Cheque fraud running a distant third.