Thanks very much for your advice and kind words. The trouble is all the books I have including British Battles and Medals by Spink have lousy photos of the medals so they are pretty useless as a way of trying to spot the fake. Clearly fakers make more from faking rare medals, but that does not seem to stop them faking the common ones. I bought a fake RAF lsgc medal few years ago for £35, they will fake anything.
Many IGSMs are worth more than the K to K star and I read somewhere that the original die for the IGSM has been used in replicas. I have an IGSM I bought from one well known dealer that I am not at all sure about but cannot say for definite whether it is the real Maccoy or not. It has a slight dotting on it and the edge does not look quite right, it is not as sharp as I think it should be. Sadly I don't have access to a camera right now so I cant put up a photo of it and ask for opinions. The other thing is I already have a K K star and I still couldn't see anything wrong with the one to Jas Clarke. I bought it from a well known dealer who seems to have new stars coming in all the time, suspicious? I wonder how many of these stars were issued to British troops, not many I should think.
I'll continue to collect but now that I have all the most important medals from 1854 I will have to be very careful what I buy and only from Dixons from now on. I cannot risk spending say £hundreds on fakes.