Israel: Police Burst Massive Coin Forging Operation

[Bimat]

Forgers allegedly planned to flood Israeli market with half a million NIS 10 coins a day

BY STUART WINER April 21, 2015, 11:03 am

The undercover operation by the Lahav 433 serious crimes unit busted the ring, which included four men and a woman.

On Sunday, police, who had been following the suspects for some time, swooped down on a building in the central region of the country and caught two members of the gang in the act of producing the NIS 10 coins ($2.50).

In a statement, police said the lab was equipped with a template, raw materials and the machinery to engineer up to half a million coins every day, worth the equivalent of $1.27 million.

"The findings and seized materials raise the suspicion that this was a laboratory with the technological means to produce masses of coins, estimated to reach an output of half a million coins per day," police said, and warned of the potential damage that large amounts of forged currency can cause to the market.

At the site, police found thousands of coins ready for use, with others in various states of completion.

According to police, the suspects carried out practice runs of introducing the coins into circulation, including checking how realistic they looked.

Authentic Israeli NIS 10 coins are bronze with a nickel ring and weigh about seven grams each. The coins are embossed on the face side with a seven-leaved palm tree along with two baskets of dates, the state emblem, and the words "for the redemption of Zion" in modern and ancient Hebrew scripts. On the reverse side the coins have their value, print date according to the Hebrew calendar, and "Israel" written in Hebrew, English, and Arabic.

The four suspects were to be brought to the Rishon Lezion Magistrate's Court on Monday to be remanded in custody.

Source: Times of Israel

[Bimat]

Israel's population (according to 2013 census) is little above 8 million. If this particular gang is capable of producing half million coins per day, wouldn't that sound weird?

Aditya

[<k>]

Either the gang was very efficient (possible) or the police are lying.

[Figleaf]

Or the journalist is hyperventilating. Note how the article says the press has a capacity of half a million a day (about 1 000 a minute, not unusual). That means the fraudsters could produce 500 000 coins in a - presumably eight hour - working day, provided they had the flans ready, the dies stayed intact and there was not a single technical mishap.

Having produced and finished the coins (assuming they could finish half a million a day), the coins still had to be put in circulation. Imagine the task. That is all there is to the hype. On an exceptional day, they could have struck (not circulated) half a million coins. The rest is fantasy, passing for journalism.

Peter

[Bimat]

The news says that the police statement says so about possible capacity of counterfeiting..

In a statement, police said the lab was equipped with a template, raw materials and the machinery to engineer up to half a million coins every day, worth the equivalent of $1.27 million.

"The findings and seized materials raise the suspicion that this was a laboratory with the technological means to produce masses of coins, estimated to reach an output of half a million coins per day," police said, and warned of the potential damage that large amounts of forged currency can cause to the market.

So perhaps police are overestimating the capacity of 'private' mint.

aditya

[Figleaf]

The key phrase is "up to", the equivalent of "with a maximum of". In a forging operation, the bottleneck is distribution, not production.

Peter