500 Yen Or 500 Won? Fraudulent Use Of Won Coins Rises In Japan, Sparking Concerns

Agree on the weights being incorrect in the article. Here are the numista links to the coins in question:

https://en.numista.com/1652
https://en.numista.com/9586

yes less confusing making changes for shop owners.

This has been a problem with these two coins going back decades.

An author in Korea, who was earlier a former currency designer for the Korean Mint at the time that the 500-Won coin was being planned in the 1980-1981 period wrote that he objected to his Mint's initial plan to issue a coin of almost the same specifications as the then soon-to-be-released 500-Yen coin in nearby Japan. His objections were ignored.

When they were first issued, the specifications (thickness, diameter) of the two coins were exactly the same, but the 500-Won was slightly heavier. Because the 500-Won coin was between 1/4 to 1/7 of the value of the 500-Yen coin (depending on exchange rate), criminals in Korea and Japan would drill small divots into the faces of 500-Won coins to lighten them so that they would weigh the same.
Why?
For use in Japanese vending machines and cash machines. Due to these machine's weak slug-detecting ability, and the fact that when you dropped a coin into a Japanese vending or cash machine and hit the "return" button, the machines did NOT drop the coin you just deposited into the slot, but would instead "credit" the user 500 yen and the machine would drop a coin from the coin hopper (which was full of real 500-Yen coins). Or the cash machine would "credit" the user the amount of these slugs they deposited as 500 yen each in value and then the fraudsters would drain the machine of its (real) Japanese cash!

Now it seems that unaltered 500-Won coins are simply being passed off in Japan in low-light situations or "quick hand" transactions when people aren't paying attention.

This "slug" counterfeiting happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I even include one of these slugs in my frankenstein Dansco airtite year-set album. You can see it here at 7:29 in this video:


I wrote about this in my chapter on the 500-Won coin in my book, South Korean Coins in the Era of Development.

Thank you!