Like almost every other homeless person I appreciate the occasional helping hand. Sometimes, even the odd helping back-hand (to coin a phrase) doesn’t hurt either.

Last month, for example, I had the good fortune to find a rather beat up two-dollar coin sitting smartly on top of a bollard next to a Dumpster in a Fairview back alley.

I was happy to have it.

Added to the five dollar bill in my pocket, the “toonie” gave me just enough money to pay for my breakfast the next morning. Phew!

Unexpected monetary instability

You can imagine my relief and then my dismay when I picked up the battered coin and it fell apart in my hand!

The significance of its rough appearance suddenly became as clear as the big hole in its centre.

Some joker had beaten the bi-metal coin with both blunt and pointed tools until its two snap-together components—an outer ring of steel and an inner disk of aluminum bronze (copper alloyed with aluminum)—had come apart.

Undoubtedly the same joker had then wedged the centre back into the outer ring and left the two loosely-paired parts of the coin sitting conspicuously atop the bollard—deliberately in close proximity to a frequently-gleaned Dumpster—where an unsuspecting scavenger, such as myself, was almost guaranteed to find it.

After I gaped a bit at the two pieces of coin in the palm of my hand I had to laugh.

It was the sort of harmless practical joke that some Vancouver residents seem to enjoy playing on us “recyclers”—on par with sticking coins to the pavement, leaving counterfeit bank notes on recycling blue bins, or throwing away deceptively full bags of potato chips.

I have been on the receiving end of such mild pranks more than a few times in my 14 years of homelessness.

Whether these sorts of shenanigans are perpetrated in the spirit of gentle, mocking fun—binners and Dumpster divers do display a humourous (if desperate) optimism which arguably invites light ridicule—or whether they represent passive aggressive reactions to the annoyance that we cause residents, I cannot say.

I would guess there are a little of both impulses at work. Either way though, no harm, so no foul.

And in the specific case of the discombobulated toonie, I was happily able to spend it on my breakfast Tuesday morning. All I had to do was take it to my sleeping spot Monday evening and gently hammer it back together.

You might even say that I knocked the cents back into it—to give this resident’s joke a proper punchline.

Speaking of pranks, I bet you a hundred bucks this is fake

United States paper money, with its deliberate simplicity, tends to look phony even when it is the genuine article. (I say this as a Canadian who is used to Canada’s coulourful and beefy polymer bank notes.)

But I do not think that anyone would be taken in for long by the tattered and torn U.S. “C-note”, or “Benjamin“, that I found tucked into a back alley fence by a recycling blue bin set back on September 18 of last year.

Any flicker of hope I felt about my newfound wealth was extinguished when I turned the banknote over.

Made-in-China “training money”—to help, not trick cashiers

What some resident had left for a binner like me to find was a piece of Chinese “training money”; in this case, facsimile United States banknotes—the same size and design of real U.S. bank notes but surprinted on one or both sides with prominent Chinese characters—intended to be used to familiarize cashiers in China with the various denominations of U.S. money.

Hard as it is to believe, such facsimiles apparently look good enough and are cheap enough (supposedly 100 pieces cost less than $20 online) that they are being used to trick cashiers in the United States.

The Sheriff’s Office of Calvert County, Maryland (on the eastern seaboard of the United States) made national headlines when it blogged in December of 2017 that it was dealing with several cases of fake “Chinese banknotes”:

“The Calvert County Sheriff’s Office has had multiple calls for counterfeit currency resembling United States currency with Chinese writing printed on the front and back. The counterfeit bills are sold on the internet as Chinese banknotes. They come in lots of 100 pieces and are sold for $16.99. Some of the notes have duplicate serial numbers printed on the front. Chinese bank tellers use the banknotes when learning how to count American currency.  Please be vigilant and report anyone attempting to use these fake bills.”

There have been many other reports over the past two years from various parts of the United States (including California, Montana and Tennessee), of people trying to buy merchandise with faux-American Chinese training money (otherwise referred to as “practice money”).

Plus it turns out that Chinese cashiers need to be fluent in more than just United States currency.

In May 2017, similar Chinese training versions of Australian currency were successfully fobbed off down under in the city of Darwin.

And (gasp) in August of 2017, the RCMP reported that cheap-looking, Chinese-labelled training versions of Canada’s perfect polymer bank notes had turned up in Canada’s Maritime and Prairie provinces!