A friend of mine from college was dating a guy from Canada, and he was CONVINCED that there was an on-going scam to take Canadian quarter to the US in order to make a profit by circulating them as US quarters (back when there was a bigger difference in value). He didn’t quite understand how impossible that would be. Even if we assumed someone could their hands on, say, 1 ton of Canadian quarters (~207,000 quarters), and they profit 10 cents from each (which is a HUGE stretch), they still have to circulate 207,000 quarters! That’s a lot of laundry to make $20,700. You’d have to circulate 567 quarters every day for a year.
I’ve received foreign coins in my change twice in the past year: a Swedish 1-krona coin as a quarter, and a Singaporean 20-cent coin as a nickel. In an odd coincidence, both are currently worth about 16¢.
Common to get intermixed US/Canadian money near the boarder, but why are the currencies of 2 close by nations allowed to be so similar? Evidently from an above post England/Ireland also?
Canada used dollars because the US used dollars and it was big and right next door. When Canada started making its own coins denominated in dollars, coins generally had a metal value similar to their face value. Two silver coins worth a quarter of a dollar are going to be very similar.
The Canadian penny and nickel were kind of just ripped off, though.
Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom until 1922, and the Irish pound was just a British pound with different coins and banknotes until the 1970s when the values diverged.
Ireland has since switched to the euro and the coins are quite different.
The last major oddity I remember in my change was a token for the Fun Spot Arcade which looks suspiciously like a quarter but appears to be made of plastic.
Yeah, I occasionally get Canadian or Mexican coins in my change- maybe 2-3 times a year, and every few years, I find something more interesting.
I seem to recall seeing pound notes in Scotland (issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland) as late as 1996.
Yeah, I’m another one in the “one wrong coin and you think it’s a scam?” camp. Never attribute to malice that which can be ascribed to stupidity (and/or simple human error).
I got one in a roll once. I still have it. I showed it to my Korean-speaking doctor. He said it is a “Korean dime.”
Besides U.S. coinage, I’ve only gotten Canadian coins in change. But I have found some Mexican coinage laying around. The two-tone nature of them made them worth more than the face value to me, so I actually pick those guys up.
I have gotten the occasional Susan B. Anthony dollar for a quarter before, though.
Doesn’t happen with Ireland now, of course (as they use the euro) but I do occasionally come across coins from Gibraltar, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands in change. They’re the same size and shape as UK coins but with different designs. They’re worth the same, too, but people usually won’t take them if they spot them. (They’re not legal tender in the UK, not that that’s particularly relevant of course.)
And back when I was at university, I brought back a load of Kenyan 5 shilling coins when I was over there, because they were an almost identical match for UK 50p pieces but worth only about 5p (they were made by the Royal Mint I believe, using the same blanks as 50p coins).
So yes, I confess, I defrauded the student union pool table out of several pounds in this manner.
Apparently a similar trick is possible using Swaziland lilangeni coins (worth about 6p) in place of £1 coins (£1 coin on right in picture).
I’ve received change from both sides of the US/Canada border on the other side. It’s just a fact of life and people tolerate one or two coins. It’s just one of those social rules that you don’t protest if someone hands you a Canadian nickel in NY or a US penny in Montreal. Now, an entire roll of quarters is another ballgame.
I’ve also received a Panamanian 1/4 Balboa coin in the US - it’s the same size as a US quarter and Panama’s currency is pegged to the USD at 1 Balboa = 1 dollar, so it’s not like I’ve really lost much.
Just a nitpick but the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Banks of the Isle of Man and the Chanell Islands still issue £1 notes, at least in theory.
A triviality of mine: my oddest chance find of this sort in the UK, was once happening to get, in the guise of a British £1 coin, a Falkland Islands £1 coin – same size / shape / metal, but with different inscriptions, and the Queen’s head on one side and a sheep on the other (well, I suppose it would have to have been either a sheep or a penguin). I kept it for quite a long while as a curiosity, but in the course of time it went who-knows-where.
Wehn I was in Mozambique, I tried to buy stamps and had only a largish bill. The man at the post office told me to come back later, he’d try to get change. I would up with coins from Mozambique, Malawi, Portugal and Angola., all of which were happily accepted later on wherever I tried to spend them. With everybody aware of the proper ex change value of them.
Once when I was a kid, at a store, I received some change that contained a Canadian dime. I immediately recognized that it wasn’t a “real” dime and told the person working there that it wasn’t a real dime.
Her response was, “Oh, that’s a Canadian dime. It’s actually worth slightly more than an American dime. You’re so lucky.”
And I was a kid, so I didn’t have the ability to stand up to an adult the way I should have.
I still think back on that day and think, “Man, what a bitch.” I mean, forcing a Canadian dime on a kid (for whom a dime was a significant amount of money)? That’s just wrong.
I was given a 10-yen coin in lieu of an American dime, when I changed planes in Narita Airport about ten years ago. It’s probably still buried in a pile of loose change somewhere.
I was in Malta some years ago and there was a local coin worth about 20p (Irish) that was the same shape and size (as well as depicting a fish) as an Irish 10p coin. The local vending machines took the Irish 10p so I committed about 50p’s worth of fraud in my pursuit of soda pop.
In It All Started with Marx, Richard Armour wrote about Leon Trotsky’s life in New York City. He said Trotsky went to the old Automat on Broadway, where he “sprung a piece of pie with a copper kopek (a Soviet coin like a penny).” In a footnote, Armour added that at that time a kopek was worth “two and one-half bottle tops.” 
It happens frequently wherever there are international travelers, so I often got foreign currency when I lived in Hawaii. I had a small collection of Japanese, Canadian, and Mexican coins obtained as change, which I eventually threw away.
If it was a scam, well, considering Waikiki prices, I hope they squeezed as much as they could out of it.