BY RANDY BOSWELL
A picture of a a one-ounce Gold Maple Leaf bullion coin. Using a few genuine coins and hundreds of fakes, three suspects are alleged to have enticed jewelry store owners into buying significant numbers of counterfeit ones.
Photograph by: Handout, Royal Canadian Mint
U.S. investigators have cracked what they're calling a "million-dollar gold coin scam" involving counterfeit versions of the Royal Canadian Mint's famous one-ounce Maple Leaf coin.
Prosecutors have announced three arrests after a New Jersey-based police sting targeted a "violent statewide criminal group" that has been swindling jewellers over the past year — or robbing them at gunpoint when the swindle fell through.
Using a few genuine Maple Leaf gold coins and hundreds of fakes, the suspects are alleged to have enticed jewelry store owners into buying significant numbers of counterfeit coins. Merchants were typically offered a cut-rate deal for a large shipment of coins after being given one or two real ones for authentication.
Jewellers who were duped ended up with a shipment of ersatz coins costing up to $100,000.
Those who discovered the ruse through additional testing, then rejected the deal and confronted the fraudsters, were victimized less subtly: by armed robbery.
In March, a jeweller in Red Bank, N.J., was drawn into a deal to acquire 100 of the Canadian coins, that have a symbolic face value of $50 but are currently selling for about $1,000 each.
The jeweller was given a single Maple Leaf coin for testing and agreed to pay cash for the entire collection, which the seller claimed he'd received as an inheritance.
A week after the initial meeting, the seller and an associate arrived to complete the transaction, but when the jeweller questioned the authenticity of the 99 other coins delivered by the pair, one of the suspects "pulled out a black handgun and demanded the cash," according to an account of the heist released by New Jersey prosecutor Robert Bianchi.
The pattern was repeated at various jewelry stores in New Jersey, and investigators discovered similar attempts at executing the Canadian coin "confidence scam" in New York and Maryland.
Three suspects who had been under surveillance were arrested on Sept. 19 at a shopping mall in Kinnelon, N.J.
The car in which the three had driven to the mall was searched by police, who found 200 counterfeit Maple Leaf gold coins.
Three men in their 50s — David Bell, William Gary and Hakim Shaheed, all New Jersey residents — face initial charges of theft by deception and conspiracy.
"While the Mint is happy to co-operate with law enforcement authorities to provide expert analysis of suspected counterfeit coins, we were not approached with regard to this particular case," mint spokesman Alex Reeves said in an e-mail.
He added that the jewellers and coin dealers approached by the New Jersey suspects appeared to be "very knowledgeable (as they typically are) and had no trouble detecting fakes on their own."
