How has a couple coins created a crisis in the Canadian economy?
It first began after a package from China arrived at a FedEx warehouse and was stopped by Canada Border Services. On the label it said 10,000 metal badges from a clothing company to a card company. Metal badges? None of this made any sense so they looked deeper. Inside the boxes they found 12,000 $2 Canadian coins and not a single metal badge. What was even stranger was that every coin was stamped in 2012. Why would anyone ship thousands of coins and call them metal badges? After looking closer into the coins, what they found was shocking! This was the largest export of fake toonies in Canadian history! Another couple thousand was seized from a suspect’s house, Généreux’s. This turn of events soon turned into a crisis. Over 26,000 coins were seized through transportation. But sadly, thousands still made it through security. The coins were then spread quickly and made up to an astonishing 10% of the total $2 toonies in circulation for that year according to City News.
It was clear that coins were getting counterfeited when a man got caught after he tried to use thousands of $2 coins to purchase his items at a store. You’ve got to think to yourself, who’s stupid enough to use thousands of counterfeit coins at one time and think he’ll get away with it? He later confessed that he had bought the coins at a garage sale. A garage sale? The most hilarious part was that he had bought them for 50% off since they were used. As if coins could go down in value if they were used.
In the end, the design of the coin was crucial for the criminals. Some differences they made included the size of the bear’s foot, a nose that was too sharp, and even completely changing the gender of the Queen. The genius part of the design is that no one actually pays enough attention to the change in their pocket to notice the differences. After the mastermind of the whole operation, Mr. He was caught, his alibi was that it was only a game piece so it couldn’t be considered counterfeiting coins. Considering how many fake $2 Canadian coins were produced and how much Mr. He made his fine was very small.
Related Stories:
https://globalnews.ca/news/10733362/quebec-fake-toonie-case-jail/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/story-behind-counterfeit-canadian-two-dollar-coin-who-nie-rmt-et1fc
https://www.numismaticnews.net/world-coins/claw-identifies-canadian-counters
Take Action:
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/banknotes/counterfeit-prevention/
https://globalnews.ca/news/10850245/how-canadians-can-spot-counterfeit-toonies/
