RCMP report reveals new details on GTA man and his ‘camel-toe’ fake toonies

An RCMP report says Durham Regional Police Service reported fakes circulating in Toronto in early 2020. It took 15 months for the Royal Canadian Mint to ask RCMP to investigate.

Global News has obtained new details about the mysterious Toronto-area man who was quietly convicted in Canada’s biggest-ever fake toonies case.

A newly released RCMP investigation report about the case suggests that Daixiong He is an affluent Chinese Canadian businessman who owned, at the time of his arrest, a major Chinese supermarket which Global News located in the Scarborough area of Toronto.

The report reveals He deposited 90 boxes of 500 suspicious toonies into business and personal accounts at three major banks across the Greater Toronto Area throughout 2021 before his May 2022 arrest; police seized nine of those boxes, or 4,500 coins, before they entered Canada’s financial system.

The RCMP report says investigators concluded He was not alone in distributing phony coins in Canada’s largest city, suggesting that a “distribution network” exists.

He, 70, escaped most public and media scrutiny with an unannounced guilty plea of uttering and possessing counterfeit money and a quickly paid $100,000 fine in a Newmarket court after his arrest in May 2022. He spent no time in jail and his possession charge was stayed after his fine payment.

The Royal Canadian Mint has publicly played down its counterfeit $2 coin problem as small.

However, the RCMP report suggests the mint privately told the RCMP in June 2021 that its random sampling of circulating $2 coins “determined that a significant volume of counterfeit two-dollar coins were in circulation in the Toronto area.”

Until now, details about the Richmond Hill businessman who possessed thousands of fake toonies and deposited them, and how the RCMP nabbed him, have remained a tightly guarded mystery.