Counterfeit Toonies Are Going To Be A Significant Problem

Here are the edges. Fake coins in the left stack, genuine in the right. The topmost coin in the left stack is a "Montreal Mint" coin. All fakes respond to a magnet the same way as genuine coins: the outer ring is magnetic and the core is not.

Update in Vancouver- a lady reported a would be customer brought in one of the counterfeits, and she refused it. The "customer" left without his purchase. This happened in the last week (Apr.12- Apr.16).

Also a person in Waterloo reported buying 20 rolls of Twoonies and finding about 30 counterfeits in them.

I think I found my first one today in some Tim's change. What do you guys think? This one weighs 7.18 rather than 7.31. The shine was a dead giveaway for me

yup

GrapeCollects, you are not wrong, at least as to how obvious these fakes are becoming to us. This is, I believe down to the excellent work by nickelsguy, both with his great articles and his posts on this site. The markers he has pointed out have made it very easy for us to verify the fakes once we suspect one. I went through 80 rolls 2 weeks ago and learned very quickly that I only needed a quick look at any particular coin to decide if it needed more than a visual.
He told us the only years to look for '96, 02, 04, 05, 06. These coins are new. Once you realize you are looking for a shiny new very old coin, even though the surface quality is not what we come to expect, it gets easy.
The larger problem, at least for me, is the lack of interest. The mint has not even acknowledged an issue with these 3 Billion Polar bear coins. Local law enforcement will gladly take them off your hands, (free gratis), so you are out 2 dollars every time you do the right thing, and the banks just continue to roll them up and resell them to any of us with enough ready cash. The only people really interested are collectors like us, of which many are quite happy to collect at least one or two of each year or just curiosity. It seems that we all want to be able to say we have a find. No one that I have discussed this with outside of the collecting community have any interest whatsoever. We have been inundated with these ezy come, ezy go Toonies for so long, that most of the General public do not even look at them. We know the difference between a loonie and a toonie when we need to pay for something and that is where it ends.
I don't have any real answers. I think I am just venting. Thanks for reading this......... and thanks for all the great info, Mike.

Mike, have you had any luck getting into contact with your RCMP contacts?

I have a feeling the reason why this explosion of counterfeit toonies is not being reported in the news is likely because the police are actively investigating it. You can't catch the criminals if the news reports it and criminals are spooked into stopping their activities. CBC did seem interested in doing a story on this but the person stopped replying.

Since these people are actively dumping $1000 boxes of toonies at the banks. To catch these guys, simply send a memo to all bank branches across Canada to keep track of who is depositing full boxes of toonies and set the boxes aside before recycling them to Brinks or whoever. That's all it takes. I can't imagine too many people deposit boxes of toonies and someone who keeps doing it should certainly ring alarm bells. Though I suspect they're already doing this and keeping tabs on the depositors to try and find the source of who is at the top of the chain.

They can't approach these people the way we did at our store. We basically interrogated and skewered the customer using full rolls of these coins and all that happened was they clammed up, lied and ran out the door (minus their coins because we seized it). To find the source, the police are likely going to take their time to investigate, spy on suspected couriers of these coins and slowly find their way to the top.

@wilsonwu89, except the CBC reports go all the back to 2010 and according to that article both the RCMP and RCM "were playing down a report on a Toronto TV station...".

So the counterfeit issue has been well known for a long time and the responsible authorities have not done anything about it.

For anyone interested in a refresher, please go back to the 1st post in this thread dated July 8th of last year. It was by givemean95 and it certainly contains some great insight without reference to meaningless tripe like who is or is not responsible for the correction. Reading the entire thread puts so much more credence into this entire assault on our coinage as well as the almost indifference to what is actually happening.