Yep.

Basically as soon as coinage was invented there were two main types of fraud around the monetary system: counterfeiting, also known as coining, and removal of small amounts of the precious metal, generally called clipping or shaving.

To back up a step, coinage until Sir Isaac Newton introduced the modern system, relied on coins being a specific weight of a given metal--hence the stamping of it was an official verification that it was a given metal at a given weight.

Clipping was often practiced, but easily detected by weighing coins and seeing that they were underweight, while counterfeiting involved replacing some of a coin's weight with a metal of a lower value.

There were a few different methods for this, including making a coin out of a base metal then plating it in a valuable one (known as a fourrée), creating a coin black that "sandwiched" base metal with valuable metal, then striking that as a coin with a forged striker, or carefully drilling into a real coin from the edge to remove a quantity of the valuable metal, then filling the void created with a base one.

Generally, at least in more recent cases, the government whose currency was being counterfeited would take such crimes very seriously--as treason--since what was being counterfeited was really the government's guarantee of the money's value. So death penalty, and not a nice clean hanging, but a drawing and quartering, was often the punishment.

Sourced mainly from Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist, Thomas Levenson, 2009.