I found a 100 won korean coin in my quarters, is that a scam

Today I found a 100 won south korean coin in with my quarters. It is roughly the same size and weight as a quarter, as far as I can tell. Someone gave it to me w/o knowing it wasn’t a quarter, and they must’ve gotten it from somewhere.

So is there some kind of scam where people mix these korean coins (worth 9 cents) in with quarters when buying or trading in money? That is only a 16 cent profit and seems like a pretty dumb way to make money unless you are passing off hundreds of them as quarters.

I’d guess it’s not so much a scam as it is money that just made it’s way here from there and got mixed in with our money because it fits through all of our coin sorters without getting tossed out.

I came home from South America once and found that a Colombian coin (worth about a dime) made Canadian vending machines think it was a quarter. But it would not have fooled an American slot.

Near the Canadian border, if you buy a roll of quarters at a bank, it will almost always contain at least one Canadian quarter, which does not work in American machines.

Possible. Or possibly someone just had one and was able to pass it off as a quarter just to get rid of it. I once got bad service in a Milwaukee restaurant and tipped with a pound note I had left over from a trip to London. Let’s see what the lazy broad does with that!

2 weeks ago a fellow officer got sent to a business on a report of counterfeit bills being received. 3 of them were ones, I kid you not!:smack:

That must have been a long time ago. The pound note was replaced by a coin back in the 80s. Now they are going to replace the circular gold coloured coin with a twelve sided bi-metal coin to foil counterfeiters.

Many years ago (so they may have twiddled the weights and dimensions since) I discovered that the UK 5p coin was quite an effective substitute for the Canadian 25 cent coin in most vending machines I tried it in in Canada (needless to say there wouldn’t be much point in using a 25 cent coin instead of a 5p in a UK vending machine).

Was it a scam? Yes, I guess so. I might have ripped off the poor vending machine man for a couple of bucks (I had been on a trip to the UK; that’s why I had UK coins in the first place). Do I think I was a major criminal? No.

You may have run into something similar. Or, there may be a Korean that is simply not particularly careful segregating his Korean coins from his American ones. I think one of the Philipines coins (may have the country confused) is similar to our dimes. I’ve had at least one. For any case where one country’s coins are physically similar to another’s you are going to run into that. Seems to me it would be difficult to pull off a really lucrative scam that way.

It was in about 1989. And I had had it for about 2 years at the time. And the fee to exchange in for U.S. dollars was more than the note was worth. It had no more value here than a slip of paper. Which is actually worth more than the lousy service we had gotten from that waitress.

What, you’ve never gotten Canadian coins ever? I’ve seen it happen all the time.

When I did the armored thing, every once in a while we’d get a bag of counterfeit money from a downtown bank, to be taken in and turned over to the Feds. The really stupid part of that was that the bank in question was 3 fucking blocks from the FBI regional offices and 5 from the Federal Reserve Bank. :smack:

Some you couldn’t really tell were counterfeit at a glance, but dayum, some of them were so blatantly obvious you wondered how anyone was stupid enough to take them.

Canadian coins? Oh yeah, this is Minnesota. They’re all around. Most vending machines won’t take them, so you just pass them off at the next fast food/coffee place you visit. I’ve lived here over 40 years and I’ve never seen anyone make a fuss about it, they’re just a fact of life.

Back in the day, when was a bartender, we went through a lot of quarters during a weekend. All sorts of odd, international coins ended up in the rolls of quarters we opened.

So? I’ve been in law enforcement since 1982 and the FBI has never been contacted about counterfeit money complaints. Nor has any reserve Bank branch.

Counterfeit money is usually not that big of deal. The secret service is called and whatever happens is up to them. Many of times not much happens. They may or may not come and take it, and that’s it. It’s a 1 or 2 paragraph report for the street cop, THE END.

That’s awesome. Can I have it? I’ll pay you 25¢ for it. :wink:

I’m kind of amazed that people can reach adulthood without having had this happen to them several times. I’m always finding random foreign coins in my change - in my case generally Kiwi or Singaporean. About every two or three months, I’d say. Maybe it just depends where you live?

Before Ireland switched to the Euro, it was common, in Britain, to get Irish coins, especially pennies, which were identical in size and color to the British equivalents, in your change. The Irish punt was linked to the British pound, so values were equivalent too, and in Ireland itself both British and Irish coins were considered legal tender (in practice, at any rate, but I think also in Irish law), but Irish coins were not considered legal tender in Britain. Nevertheless, they circulated quite a lot.

(Actually, I am not sure if this continued after teh British coinage went decimal, in 1971. I am not sure if Ireland followed suit, and changed its coins to match the new British ones. However, it was certainly the case before that.)

Why would you assume this on the basis of finding one wrong coin in your change?

Foreign change gets mixed in when people travel internationally (either when they take their own currency with them or return with some from the country they visited).

The sheer number of different currencies in the world, coupled with the practical limits on how a coin can be designed (i.e. generally a metal disc of thickness X and diameter Q) mean that accidental collisions of shape and size are almost inevitable.

It’s a rare day that I don’t find one NZ coin in my purse. I also get the occasional dime (or do I mean nickel??). It’s never crossed my mind that this could be a scam.

I swear, the Kiwis are trying to take us over, one 20c piece at a time!

Bustards.

:smiley:

That did indeed happen in 1971. I found the pre-decimal Irish coins – quite often encountered in Britain, as you say – rather sweet: they depicted various tame and wild creatures, a different kind for each value. I particularly liked the half-penny (a sow and piglets), and the penny (a hen and chickens). A few of the former birds and beasts were retained on some of the higher decimal-coin values.

Yis.

The bar I sometimes drink at took a counterfeit twenty. Texture was all wrong, but during a busy evening and dim light it passed. They never reported it, instead they keep it around as a teaching aid for new 'tenders.