A genuine Toonie, on the left, and a fake Toonie with a “camel tip” .JP MOCZULSKI / The Globe and Mail
The recent discovery of thousands of counterfeit coins by the RCMP has raised concerns about the integrity of Canada’s banking system, through which they circulated with apparent ease.
It also raises a question: why should anyone falsify the humble tonie? Confiscated counterfeits seem to contradict the predominant wisdom about counterfeiting: because high-denomination notes involve about the same amount of labor and entry costs as low-value coins, $ 50 and $ 100 notes are much more attractive targets for counterfeiting than tones.
The answer could be in China, where the RCMP alleges that the Camel Toe Toonies originated (called for their most conspicuous defect, a defect in the polar bear’s leg).
Daixiong He, 68, of Richmond Hill, Ontario, was arrested last month and charged with uttering counterfeit money and possession of counterfeit money. (None of the allegations have been proven in court.) The RCMP said the charges came from a nearly a year of investigation during which it identified and confiscated some 10,000 counterfeit pieces of the Canadian banking system. (The Canadian Bankers Association declined to answer questions.)
Counterfeit reports emerged during the first half of 2020, when a trader found 75 of them in a cash register. The trader, who did not publicly identify himself, posted a message about the discovery in July 2020 at a coin collectors forum.
“Given that I’ve been finding them and shutting them down since March, I guess they’re already in circulation in large quantities in the [Greater Toronto Area]”He wrote.” There’s no way they can benefit from these tonics by spending them on $ 2 coffees. “
That news soon spread among collectors. Mike Marshall, a currency expert in Quinte West, Ontario, who has given seminars on counterfeit identification, said he bought five rolls of tonne in October 2020 and identified 26 counterfeits. Each had the distinctive defect: the right front leg of the polar bear had a large split toe.
Brent Mackie, treasurer of the Waterloo Coin Society, met the Camel Toe Toonies through an online forum in March 2021. He went to the bank and bought a box of toonies and found two impostors. His curiosity aroused, he bought about 500 more boxes on visits to Ontario banks for several months, a total of about $ 500,000. (He started a website dedicated to fakes.) He found about 2,500 fakes, almost all of the Camel Toe variant.
“They’re definitely not hard to find,” Mr. Mackie. “You can go to a bank, grab a bunch of rolls and you’ll almost certainly find them, at least anywhere near [Toronto]. ”
Michelle Richardson, a spokeswoman for The Royal Canadian Mint, which produces Canadian coins, said the Mint detected counterfeits last summer through random sampling. (She declined to describe the process and said the Mint has no investigative powers.) Officials reported the case to the RCMP, which assigned the case to financial crime investigators in its section. transnational serious and organized crime.
He said it is exceptionally rare to find fake tones, but not without precedent.
Many Camel Toonies have faint impressions of the polar bear around the portrait of the queen.JP MOCZULSKI / The Globe and Mail
In September 2006, police accompanied Revenue Quebec officials to execute a search warrant at a witness manufacturing facility in Repentigny, Que., In a tax evasion case. They found equipment to make counterfeit coins, along with almost finished tuna and loonies. They called the RCMP.
The Mounties said this operation (called the Montreal Currency) was the most complex of its kind they had encountered. Those false tones bore dates from 2004 and 2005; its outer ring metal was of a darker gray than the genuine coin, and the core could be removed because it had no mechanism to hold it in place.
While the comparative quality of the fakes is in the eye of the beholder, the RCMP said in a statement that the Camel Toe Toonies were even better. Its weight, for example, was close to that of the genuine article. And they came in several varieties: Mr. Mackie said his most common dates are 1996, 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006.
The RCMP said in an email response to questions that counterfeits are sophisticated as they were able to enter the financial system and were accepted and deposited in banks.
However, they included notable defects, the most obvious being the raw right front leg of the polar bear. The fonts differ in an obvious way from the genuine article: real coins use sans serif fonts, while some versions of Camel Toe include serifs. Mr Marshall said the maple leaf on the obverse is a little too tall.
Mr. Mackie paid special attention to manufacturing defects. For example, when dies (the metal stamps used to make a coin) collide with each other, they leave a damage called a dice roll in subsequent counterfeits. (This could happen when an operator does not place a blank coin between them.) Many Camel Toonies have faint impressions of the polar bear around the queen’s portrait, she said. In addition, the defects of the previous versions become more pronounced in the later ones.
Mr. Mackie said this indicates the operation produced many fakes and quality control was not a priority.
“They’re using these matrices until they literally explode,” he said.
Coin expert Brent Mackie at his home in Kitchener, Ontario, June 24.JP MOCZULSKI / The Globe and Mail
Herein lies a possible explanation of how counterfeiting tones could be profitable: economies of scale. Mr. Mackie says, “When you start making millions of them, you can reuse all the dies and machinery, and split that cost for each individual piece. When you’re producing millions of them, it can only cost 50 cents a coin to produce. “
This is the first foreign-based Canadian counterfeit ring known to the Mint. But the putative origin of coins in China did not surprise collectors, who are accustomed to seeing replicas made in China of rare collector coins.
“They didn’t make them to be marketed as a real thing,” Mr. Marshall on the replicas of collecting. “They honestly do them so that people fill in the holes in their collection that they could never afford.” But unscrupulous sellers often buy these coins and sell them online at inflated prices to unwary collectors, he added.
With the fakes, he added, “The only thing that has changed is that now adventurous people are realizing that the Chinese will do whatever they want. If you send them a photo, give them a diameter and a weight, they will.”
As part of his efforts to persuade e-commerce sites and authorities to prevent the sale of counterfeits made in China, Mr. Marshall has commissioned thousands of counterfeits from Chinese suppliers. None of those shipments were able to cross the border into Canada and reach their door through the postal service, he said. (Canada Border Services Agency spokeswoman Rebecca Purdy these agents are trained to look for smuggling and other customs violations; between 2017 and 2021, its agents found a mixture of counterfeit notes and coins and carried out 25 enforcement actions.)
Mr. Marshall estimated that “millions” of Camel Toonies are in circulation. Initially found in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, they are now found throughout the country.
In addition, Mr. Mackie and Mr. Marshall says they have seen whole boxes of tons directly from banks that did not contain a single genuine coin. Marshall said police should have started investigating when they were first alerted to counterfeits in 2020 and that attempts to engage public officials and the media were unsuccessful.
“Because they were coins, no one reacted,” Marshall said. “Everyone said, ‘Yeah, right, who’s going to fake a tonie?’ That’s exactly why you fake a tonie: because no one is watching. “
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