Warning as coin worth £10 sells for £300 on eBay

Michael Bond’s most famous literary creation, Paddington Bear, was well-known for piercing suspicious characters with his hard stare.

And that may well have been his response to the news that a ‘Paddington Bear at the Tower of London’ 50p coin sold for £300 on eBay.

The 2019-minted coin is part of a series issued by the Royal Mint which shows the duffel-coated bear travelling around London.

According to Express.co.uk the Ebay listing stated: “Rare Paddington Bear Tower Of London 50p. Dispatched with Royal Mail 1st Class Large Letter.”

The online auction site then shows the coin was sold on November 28 for £300 after two bids were placed.

However, a simple search of the Royal Mint website reveals the coin is available for just £10 in a “Brilliant Uncirculated” finish.

To make matters worse for the marmalade-sandwich lover who paid £290 over the odds, the coin is not a limited edition and plenty more are still for sale.

This is not a unique situation, since £1,500 was once paid by an eBay shopper for a Peter Rabbit coin described as “the world’s rarest Peter Rabbit 2017 50p coin,” even though expert research contests this claim.

This states that the rarest 50p is the Kew Gardens coin, with only 210,000 minted. 

The London 2012 Olympics football 50p has 1,125,500 in circulation while the wrestling coin has 1,129,500 in circulation.

It is not easy to evaluate the rarest 20p, 10p and even 2p coins since exact circulation figures are not known.

However, versions of the coins have fetched large sums, notably dateless 20ps from 2008 of which somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 exist. 

The 1983 ‘New Pence’ 2p coin also sells for as much as £650.

The rarest £2 coin is the 2002 Commonwealth Games NI edition with 485,500 in circulation. This is followed by the 2002 Commonwealth Games Wales which had 588,500 minted.

The rarest £1 coins are part of a series celebrating British capital cities. The 935,000 2011 Edinburgh coins top the list while there are

1,615,000 Cardiff coins from the same year and 2,635,000 of the 2010 London edition in circulation.