Coins mistaken for another country's.

ajaan

At first glance, looks Canadian 25c.

TwoKopeiki

Sneaky Bahamans

laurentyvan

At first I thought I could come up with another such example, easy..but, not that easy after all.

ajaan

The coin I posted was actually in a group of Canadian quarters sent to me a while ago.

1960NYGiants

Bermuda 5c coins often end up in Canadian nickel rolls.

Sapyx

Most of the nations of the old British Empire, the parts that used the pound sterling, continued to use "sterling-sized" coins once they began to make their own pound coinages. When these counties then went decimal in the 1960s and 70s, many of the decimal coins were identical in size to their old predecimal equivalents. Thus, in the 1980s, you had a whole bunch of different countries, especially down here in the South Pacific, all with their own currencies and exchange rates, but with coins identical in size to each other.

For a numismatic display in a local library, I once put together a page of them. The following "foreign coins" are all circulation coins issued by our South Pacific neighbours, equivalent in size to an Australian 10 cent piece, and could readily be found in change here in Australia:

• New Zealand 10 cents
• Fiji 10 cents
• Solomon Islands 10 cents
• Cook Islands 10 cents
• Papua New Guinea 10 toea
• Western Samoa 10 sene
• Tonga 10 seniti
• Kiribati 10 cents
• Tuvalu 10 cents
• Vanuatu 10 vatu
• New Hebrides 10 francs
• New Caledonia 10 francs
• French Polynesia 10 francs

The first four all have the Queen's portrait on the obverse, like Australian coins do, so were much more likely to be confused with Australian coins. The last four are all French-franc-based and not pound-sterling based coinages; the similarity in size is coincidental.

Now, with each country going their separate ways as each one reforms their coinages and the old, heavy, sterling-derived coinage dimensions become obsolete, the tendency to find these coins in change has rapidly diminished. New Zealand, Fiji, the Cook Islands, Tonga and Samoa have all undergone such coinage reforms in the past couple of decades.

This is on top of similarly sized coins from elsewhere in the former or current British Empire (Britain, Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Falkland Islands, St Helena/Ascension and Southern Rhodesia).

lordmarcovan

Yep. Been there. Done that.

Easy to do when so many countries have QE2 on the obverse of their coins.

PS- even though I agree, I'm gonna "disagree" with your premise in the OP to make up for you being my sole "disagree" vote on some other thread. (I think it was my nonsense thread. One of my nonsense threads, anyway. LOL)

ajaan

Ouch! That hurts Rob.

WillieBoyd2

It is not just in Canada that this happens.

I got a Bahamas five cent piece from a US Post Office.

Commonwealth of the Bahamas Five Cents 2004

I kept it.

YQQ

many quarter size coins of UK countries have the same, or very similar images of the respective king and are usually the same size.
these are very easy miss-attributed. Mostly European dealers also miss-attribute Straits settlement coins with Canadian coins.

worldcoinguy

I have always thought that Finland pre WWI minors are quite easy to confuse with Russian pieces at first glance.

Tookybandit

Cool coin! I really like the currency from the Bahamas too, it is super colorful! I have some older circulated Canadian silver coins that I kept from a collection I purchased. Not high value, but they have such a great look to them!