Fake Swedish coins mock 'whore king'

Counterfeit Swedish coins bearing a reference to "whore king" Carl XVI Gustaf have been found in circulation, media reports said Thursday. The coins appear to make fun of the monarch over his rumoured infidelities, detailed in an unauthorised biography published in 2010 and which he never denied outright. At least three people from three different towns have come forward to say they discovered the counterfeit one-krona coins in their possession. The real coin features an embossed profile of the king with the words "Carl XVI Gustaf * Sweden's King" printed around the edge, while the inscription on the counterfeit reads: "Carl XVI Gustaf * Our Whore of a King". "I was surprised, to put it mildly," David Rosenlund, from the southern Swedish town of Malmoe, told the online version of daily Expressen. Karin Mattsson, in the northern town of Piteaa, said she did a double-take. "My first reaction was that I was seeing funny," she told Piteaa-Tidningen. The head of Sweden's Royal Coin Cabinet museum, Ian Wisehn, said the counterfeiter must have put a lot of time and effort into making the fakes look good enough to fool people. "You have to be pretty crafty," he told Swedish news agency TT, adding: "It's not easy." The 66-year-old king, who has been on the throne since 1973 and who married Queen Silvia in 1976, has been the subject of numerous tabloid reports since the tell-all biography came out. The book describes the king's and his friends' constant partying and playing around with young women, including details of an alleged year-long affair with Army of Lovers lead singer Camilla Henemark in the late 1990s.