The time, effort and expense of counterfeiting one dollar coins just doesn’t make sense.
It’s easy to at least understand a criminal’s motivation in counterfeiting rare and valuable coins. But the incentive to forge a daily and common circulating coin? It defies logic.
Yet, that’s exactly what happened with a New Zealand dollar coin. And there’s currently an investigation into counterfeit U.S. Presidential $1 coins, although it would boggle the mind if those were verified as fake.
The U.S. case has been covered and, so far, nothing is new. However, the New Zealand story is intriguing, although brief in detail.
New Zealand counterfeit dollar coin
The story was published on Stuff.co.nz, a news and information website of Fairfax New Zealand. In short, a woman believes she received the coin as change, she noticed how bad it was and then handed it into the police.
The reporting article sums everything up well with the first paragraph:
"A counterfeiter seems hellbent on living out the adage that crime doesn’t pay by spending a lot of time and money on producing a poor copy of the $1 coin."
According to the United States Secret Service, most counterfeit coins are made by pouring liquid metal into molds or dies. Mints press or stamp coins. The less technical procedure is usually easier to identify because the results are likely to produce weight varieties, visible marks and dimples.
It was this method that was likely used by the counterfeiter. The fake coin had an incorrect diameter, weight, thickness color and metallic composition.
A New Zealand dollar coin is made from aluminum-bronze while the fake was apparently cast in brass. In short, it was a very bad fake.
To catch the full article on Stuff.co.nz, read: Lot of effort to make fake coin.
