A RARE 20p coin has sold for a whopping £430 on eBay, all because one side is completely blank.
The error coin is missing the design on one of its faces – The Queen’s head is still intact, but there is no telling where the coin’s tail has got to.
Only there is, and the rare minting error is likely down to a seperate rogue 20p coin blank being struck by the obverse and reverse dies, but struck a second time with the reverse die.
So somewhere out there there’s another 20p with this coin’s missing design on, twice.
When it came to this coin’s turn to be struck, it will have received a strike of the stuck 20p (reverse side) and the obverse die – leaving it with the prominent missing feature.
One avid collector has plucked the coin out of the masses though, and made a small fortune selling it on, on eBay.
Impressively, the listing started at a mere 99p, only taking seven days to rocket to the £430 final call.
10 bidders were keen, and between them placed 30 bids over the week that the auction was live.
The Royal Mint manufactures between three million and four million coins a day, so often things will go wrong.
But in the grand scheme of things, the number of rare error coins out there is still very small.
That means collectors are keen to get their hands on any they find, and usually place a big ticket price on one they wish to sell on.
If the coin didn’t have the obvious mistake to show off, it would only be worth its face value of 20p.
But the simple error, which could have happened because of the machine or human intervention, means in this case its worth soared over 2,000 times more than the face value price.
Can I make a mint from an error?
If you spot a coin that looks different to normal or is imperfect, you can check it against other listings on eBay to see how much others are selling or willing to pay for a similar strike.
We’ve often seen bidding wars break out on the most highly sought-after copies.
Error coins are still legal tender, so there’s always a chance one will show up in your change.
Usually you can determine if something is the real deal by the number of bidders on a similar eBay listing who were willing to stake their claim on it.
But a buyer can always pull out of the sale, which means it won’t have sold for the price that it may say it has.
Change experts like Coin Hunter or Change Checker will help you verify if something is a real error too, and they can help place a value as well.
But beware of fakes, as you could find yourself duped by something that’s not actually valuable.
