The hunt for millions of counterfeit toonies

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan All I know is that I’ve looked through the bowl of change on my dresser more times this week than I have in the past two years. That’s because, unbeknownst to me, and probably unbeknownst to you too, we are in the middle of something of a boom period for counterfeit toonies. And the ones circulating right now have some interesting features, including one that makes it easy for even a lay person to spot. I didn’t have any of these toonies, but you may want to check yours. There are likely millions of them in circulation. So what’s wrong with them? Who’s doing this? And how do they end up in banks and cash registers? And why would someone counterfeit toonies and as opposed to 20s? These are all valid questions and they’re all questions that you can’t answer without taking a trip into the world of coin collecting, which, despite how frequently you pay without cash these days, is still thriving. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Brent Mackie is the creator and administrator of a website called cameltoetoonies.CA. We’ll get to that in one moment. He’s an avid numismatist, an amateur counterfeit investigator, and the treasurer of the Waterloo Coin Society. Hi, Brent.

Brent Mackie Hi.

Jordan Why is it called Camel Toe Toonies?

Brent Mackie That was a name that we came up with to describe the main feature of counterfeit toonies that we’re talking about. Polar bear’s front right paw looks very much like the foot or the toe of a camel, hence the name.

Jordan Just to rewind a little bit before we get into the camel toe toonies. This is not the first time that somebody’s bothered to counterfeit Tunis. How long ago was the other time?

Brent Mackie So, back in 2006, some police in Quebec, assisted by Revenue Quebec officials, were serving a warrant for GST evasion at a manufacturing facility. And when they entered, they discovered a whole bunch of one and two-dollar coins and production materials for them and equipment for it. It was the first main counterfeit operation for toonies here in Canada. And there were apparently millions of those coins that have been both produced, entered circulation and discovered on-site during that warrant serving. So that was definitely the first operation for candidates. And we can still find those in circulation today.

Jordan Oh, I was going to ask. Yeah, I guess you don’t just grab them all, right? Some of them just sneak past and keep going from hand to hand.

Brent Mackie Absolutely, absolutely. Coins and even banknotes are in circulation. You can still find really old stuff in your change from time to time. It does get quite rare, but you can still find that. And it still proves true for those earlier Montreal-based counterfeits.

Jordan How do you go about making a counterfeit toonie?

Brent Mackie If anything can be made, it can be counterfeit. All it takes to become a counterfeit toonie is to look like a toonie, smell like a toonie, feel like a toonie, and therefore it’s a toonie. So a lot of these counterfeits, whether we’re talking about the Montreal ones or the more modern camel toe toonie, they’re made using similar processes to what the Royal Canadian Mint does. They stamp out the two main components, the core and the ring, fit them together and then impress the design on them and you’ve got a toonie.

Jordan Is it worth it? I guess it’s a stupid question to ask because it’s obviously worth it if people are doing it. But why counterfeit toonies? It seems like you might want to take your swings at a higher dollar value.

Brent Mackie Well, for sure. That’s one of the questions that always gets asked. Why would anybody counterfeit a toonie? It’s only $2. And you’re absolutely right, it is only $2. But that’s thinking on the individual coin level. If you think about how many counterfeits have been produced, and we’re estimating probably about 5 million of them, give or take a little bit, that’s a lot of money. So all of that cash can pay for a lot of raw materials to make these things, a lot of equipment to make them, and probably a nice beamer or two as well. So that makes a lot of profit when you’re talking about that many counterfeit coins in circulation. But just to make one or two, no, it’s not even remotely worth it. The individual costs for a press, much less any of the equipment or the raw materials, would far exceed the value of a few small toonies.

Jordan So you have to be pretty sure that you’re going to be able to make a whole lot of them and pass them off to justify the investment if you’re going to do this.

Brent Mackie I would say so, yeah. I certainly wouldn’t embark upon it unless I had reasonable assurances of being able to get rid of them.

Jordan So let’s talk about the most recent toonies, then. When did we first start noticing that there was a new type of counterfeit in circulation?

Brent Mackie So we first heard about new counterfeits in July of 2020. And this is when somebody, a collector from the Greater Toronto Area, posted onto two different places on the Internet about finding 75 fake toonies in a single cash register till they had been finding them since about March of 2020, so right around the beginning of the pandemic. And they provided detailed photos and descriptions of these coins and why they thought they were counterfeit and so on. So that was the first report. And then ever since then, people have been finding them in their change in circulation and more, and the story just kind of snowballed and evolved from there.

Jordan What do we know about how they end up in circulation? I guess this applies to pretty much any kind of counterfeit, but toonies especially, how do you end up with 75 of them in one cash register?

Brent Mackie In that particular case, it was a retail establishment. So somebody would have had to come into that business and spend three rolls of toonies all at once. It could have also possibly been that the retail establishment had a supply of cash from the bank and they just opened up those three roles and all three of them were counterfeit. But those are probably the two most likely scenarios that result in that.

Jordan And so since 2020, these things have been sort of popping up here and there or is there a particular place they’re showing up? How do you try to get a handle on the scope of it?

Brent Mackie They’ve certainly been appearing in the highest quantities in the Greater Toronto Area, but they have been found throughout southwestern Ontario and in much smaller quantities across the country. But Greater Toronto Area seems to be the main center for these things and where they’re most easily found. There have been other strong reports in a town near Belleville called Trenton and I’m not sure entirely why that was a hot spot, but it certainly has been. But Greater Toronto Area is definitely the key area of that. I’m located in the Waterloo region and I have no trouble finding those coins in a box of toonies obtained locally either.

Jordan What do we know about who’s making these coins? I understand there’s been one arrest in this case so far.

Brent Mackie That’s correct. So in May of this year, the RCMP put out a press release saying that they had made an arrest and that was a gentleman out of Richmond Hill, Ontario and he’d been charged with uttering counterfeit money and possession of counterfeit money. And during the RCMP investigation, they had seized approximately 10,000 of those counterfeit two-dollar coins. Not all of them were seized from the individual that was arrested. A lot of them were seized just from circulation. But that one individual that’s been arrested, I don’t necessarily think that he’s the only person involved with this for the number of coins that have hit circulation. I think it would probably take a lot more than the efforts of one individual to do that. But that’s all the RCMP has really said so far. Just one arrest at this point.

Jordan A few minutes ago you threw out a number of 5 million counterfeits in circulation or 5 million counterfeits. How do you get to that number? Like, how do you look at the number of coins that have been found to be counterfeit and the 10,000 that the RCMP has and build off that to try to figure out the true number?

Brent Mackie So I’ve been looking through boxes of toonies for the last year or so and counting up how many I’ve been finding and comparing that to the number of real ones and so on and I’ve come up with a number of counterfeits that I’ve found over that time. I’ve compared that to the total number of genuine toonies that the Royal Canadian Mint has produced since they began in 1996. And that number is approximately 1 billion genuine toonies. So if I take the number of counterfeits that I found as a proportion of real ones, and I extrapolate that out over the total number of genuine coins that have been produced and adjusted it to say that what I’m seeing here is probably a little higher than the national average, I’ve come up with about 10 million counterfeits probably in circulation.

Jordan So I know that you’re not privy to the inside of the RCMP investigation or how banks are attacking this. But I guess my question is, if you’re going to counterfeit something at that scale, you would at some point need to get it into the banking system in order to actually do it effectively, right? Like you can’t just go around to retail stores dropping rolls of toonies all over the place. You probably need to deposit them somewhere. Is that correct? How do you get rid of that many toonies?

Brent Mackie Well, I’m certainly no expert on counterfeiting coins in terms of actually making them and distributing them, but if I were to do that sort of thing, it certainly would be necessary to get that kind of volume into the banks by a bulk deposit or maybe even something a little bit more creative. Let’s take a page out of your average Hollywood movie and hypothesize for a second here. So imagine you are driving a secure van, Brinks truck if you will. Sorry, Brinks. And you start your shift in the morning. You’re all loaded up with brand new cash and coins, ready to make your deliveries out to banks and grocery stores and whatnot. Shortly after you leave your warehouse, you roll up into another shady part of town, come up to another warehouse, the door opens up, you drive in and you open the back doors of the truck and start unloading a whole bunch of genuine toonies and load up a whole bunch of counterfeit toonies. You shut the doors out, you go back on your run again. And now you’re starting to distribute boxes of counterfeit toonies to all of these stores and banks and so on. And if anybody doesn’t look, they’re none the wiser. Now, is that realistic? I don’t know. It’s Hollywood. Take that for what it is. But could it happen? Maybe. I would like to trust that the security system is probably a little bit better than that to prevent something like that from happening, but who knows?

Jordan Well, something’s clearly happening if we’re seeing fakes at this kind of scale, right?

Brent Mackie Absolutely. And I can also tell you that from first-hand knowledge. I went to a bank in May of last year in the Greater Toronto Area and I was exchanging some boxes of toonies there. And one of the boxes that I received, I cracked it open just to have a quick look inside before I leave the branch, just to see what kind of rolls they are. If they were customer-wrapped rolls or maybe they’re brand new rolls from the Royal Canadian Mint, I like to just poke inside and have a look. And in this particular box, they were all clear plastic clamshell rolls that you get from the Dollar store or something like that. So I can see the end coins on each one of those rolls. And just for a quick glance, I knew that each one of those rolls was counterfeit. So I of course checked one of the rolls just to see if it was just the end coins that I was unlucky enough to see, or if it was the whole thing. And it turns out that the entire box was counterfeit. $1,000 of counterfeit toonies. So I had a chat with the manager and asked if they had any more of the rolls, and they still had ten of them up at the front of the branch, and they apparently be giving out the rest of them all morning. So they had two full boxes of counterfeit toonies in that particular branch. And I asked the manager where they got them, just to be curious if it may have come in from a customer or otherwise. And she said that it came in on their overnight delivery. So maybe there is something to my little Hollywood theory. I don’t know.

Jordan Let’s talk about the coins themselves. We touched on it off the top, but how good are these fakes? You mentioned that you can kind of recognize them at a glance. Would a normal person?

Brent Mackie Probably not. Most people don’t even look at their coinage. If it’s metallic and has a silver ring and a gold-coloured core and it’s about the size of a toonie, it’s a toonie. They’ll spend it to buy their coffee or whatever they want. They don’t look at their coins. Somebody who does, maybe they’re a novice collector or something. They might think that something’s a little off, but they probably wouldn’t be able to put their finger on it. But once you’re really looking at it, you know what a genuine toonie looks like and therefore you know what a counterfeit toonie would look like. You can figure out that this coin is a little suspect and this is off, this is a little different, and so on. So most people wouldn’t be able to tell. But there are a couple of easy ways to identify these new camel toe counterfeit toonies. The easiest way, and I think we’ve alluded to that before polar bears, front right paw and if that looks like a split toe or split hoof there, that’s going to be a counterfeit toonie hands down. You can do a full stop right there. Don’t even need to verify anything else. There are a few other features as well. Notably some font differences in the date or the lettering around the Queen’s portrait. There are some differences in the maple leaf that are on the back of the toonie. A very minor feature that nobody’s going to be able to look at unless they can have a magnifying glass. There are some initials on the portrait of the genuine coins that simply aren’t there on the counterfeits and there are some weight differences as well, but nobody’s going to be able to tell those just by holding a coin in their hands. The easiest way, of course, is that camels, the polar bear’s paw.

Jordan What should someone do if they’re looking at their toonie right now and being like, oh crap, I have one of these things?

Brent Mackie Well, you can’t spend it because now that you know that it’s counterfeit spending, it would be illegal. So my suggestion is, just go to your bank and say, hey, I believe this coin is probably counterfeit, can I swap it out for a genuine one and see what they say? Some banks are going to be accommodating, other banks won’t. At the end of the day, if a bank has reason to believe that you did not get that coin from them or whatever, they may refuse to take the counterfeit coin. Counterfeit coins and banknotes are unfortunately a hot potato situation. Nobody wants to get stuck with them and trying to get rid of them is passing a counterfeit and that’s a crime. So I would just say try to take it to your bank, see if they’ll take it and give you a genuine one.

Jordan So once you know it’s fake, you can’t do anything with it other than ask politely if somebody will replace it for you. You can’t even take it back to the Canadian. I said take it back to the Canadian Mint. But of course, it never came from there.

Brent Mackie No, even the Royal Canadian Mint, wouldn’t do anything for you. I mean, even the Canadian Mint doesn’t interact with genuine coins on that sort of retail level. They don’t have a cashier at the mint and you can’t go up to the mint and say, hi, I’d like a couple of rolls of toonies. They don’t have that ability, nor does the Bank of Canada for bank notes. So that’s a nonstarter route, but definitely try your local bank and see what they say.

Jordan So what comes next for the camel toe toonies and the investigation? I guess we’re waiting to see if anybody else will be charged. And I guess you’re expecting to continue to find these in circulation for years and years as you are with the first batch still now?

Brent Mackie Yeah, absolutely. It’s in the hands of the RCMP right now in terms of the legal investigation to see who’s behind this, how they’re doing it, charge the perpetrators and get them off the streets and that sort of thing. And so far they’ve only made that one press release back in May and one arrest that was mentioned in there as well. In terms of fixing up what’s in circulation, that falls under the responsibility of the Royal Canadian Mint and the partners that they work with and managing the currency system. They have the ability to sort out these old counterfeits and other old coins. It doesn’t appear that they’re doing that at this point in time yet, but it’s hard to tell without them making any sort of comment. But we may see over time that they’ve started to pull out these counterfeits and or some older presecurity toonies from circulation. That would probably be the best way to clean up what’s out there. Just pull out all the old stuff and start replacing it with brand-new coins. And then even with those Montreal toonies that we’re still seeing 15 years later, I suspect that we’re going to find the camel toe toonies in circulation for years to come, especially if the Mint doesn’t actively withdraw all of the old coins from circulation.

Jordan What do you still want to know about these coins that you don’t?

Brent Mackie I want to know who’s making them, how many were made, and what the Royal Canadian Mint is going to do about them.

Jordan The last thing I want to ask you is just a general thought that I’ve been having for a while that I know I want to talk to you about it. Since the pandemic began, I can count, I think, on like two hands the number of times that I’ve paid with a bill and gotten change in coins and haven’t even really looked at it. How do you feel about that transition that is occurring for a number of people? Like, you love coins, right? What does it mean to you to kind of see this transition happening?

Brent Mackie Well, I think there are two sides to that. If you look at the statistics from the Royal Canadian Mint and the Bank of Canada, cash is being used more than ever. There’s more cash in circulation than there ever has been, and those stats are public and can be obtained on the internet as well. But if you talk to a lot of individuals, there’s this perception that the economy is moving towards more of a cashless society and people are using debit cards and credit cards and things like e-transfers more and more. As a coin collector, I certainly would love to see people use the cash more and more and more because that means there’s more in circulation, more interesting things to find, and more collectibles out there and maybe even more collectors. If we were to be moving toward a cashless society, certainly that would go the other way. But it could also mean that people have more of a reminiscence for cash and they’re starting to pay attention to their cash a little bit more because they don’t see it as often. So maybe that might foster a little bit more collecting as well. So it’s a double-edged sword. There’s more than one side of the story.

Jordan Brent, thank you so much for taking the time for us today.

Brent Mackie My pleasure. It’s been fun.

Jordan Brent Mackie and you can find out everything you need to know about these toonies at Cameltoetoonies.CA. You can find out everything you need to know about us at thebigstorypodcast.ca, and you can tell us everything you think about us by clicking on the survey at the top of the page. You can also talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us [click here!], and you can call and leave a voicemail 416-935-5935. You can get The Big Story wherever you get your podcasts. You can like us, or subscribe to us, or follow us or rate us or review us or do anything you want, especially download. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Have a great long weekend. We’ll be back with a special episode for you on Labor Day. Back to top of page