A Toronto-area man has been fined $100,000 after he quietly pleaded guilty to possession and fraudulent use of thousands of counterfeit $2 coins after depositing the fakes into Canada’s banking system, Global News has learned.
During a brief court appearance in Newmarket on Dec. 9, 2022, That Daixiong He, 69, of Richmond Hill, Ont., admitted he was guilty for his use of fake toonies.
His plea came after he was caught injecting thousands of fake toonies into Canada’s banking system by making large deposits into several of his personal accounts at BMO, HSBC and RBC.
There also is a second person of interest in this case who appears to have escaped a deportation attempt.
Global News was unable to reach Mr. He for comment. He received no prison time, even though he faced a maximum sentence of 14 years in jail.
Ontario General Court Justice Amit Ghosh fined Mr. He $100,000 after he admitted to breaching two sections of the Criminal Code (452 a and 450 b) for “uttering and possessing” counterfeit $2 coins between Jan. 4, 2021, and Nov. 12, 2021 “without lawful justification or excuse.”
The Crown later agreed to stay the second charge of possessing fake toonies after Mr. He paid his fine by electronic bank draft, court records show.
His guilty plea came after a probe by the RCMP’s Trans-National Serious and Organized Crime unit in Toronto, led by Supt. Ann Koenig, with involvement by Fintrac, the federal government’s financial intelligence agency.
Mr. He’s arrest was announced with fanfare in May 2022 after a flood of fake toonies began circulating in Greater Toronto during the summer of 2020.
The fake $2 coins at the centre of the counterfeiting scheme became known as “Camel Toe Toonies.” That’s because counterfeit experts spotted the fake coins by the outsized toes on the polar bear’s right paw on the fake coins.
The genuine coin on the left versus the counterfeit on the right. Genuine: Fine details of the bear’s paws. 2a: The polar bear’s paw in the counterfeit is misshapen and looks like Camel toes.
RCMP
Richmond Hill defence counsel Thomas Richards, who represented Mr. He, said his client had possessed “a significant amount” of fake toonies, without saying how many. Mr. He “divested” himself of all his fake toonies a few months before his arrest, Richards added, without elaborating.
That’s when Global News learned previously undisclosed details of the RCMP investigation into Mr. He’s actions, including how up to 40,000 fake toonies were injected into the Canadian banking system by simply depositing them at three Toronto-area banks.
The RCMP launched the investigation into counterfeit two-dollar coins circulating in Toronto in July 2021 after the Royal Canadian Mint found a high level of fakes when they statistically sampled large boxes of coins to determine percentages of genuine coins versus fakes, according to evidence in the case.
After police investigators obtained several production orders to force banks to disclose account and transaction information, Daixiong He was identified as a suspect who had made multiple, large bank deposits of counterfeit two-dollar coins between Jan. 4, 2021, and Nov. 12, 2021.
Investigators also learned:
On July 26, 2021, Mr. He deposited 499 two-dollar coins into an RBC account, located at 6021 Steeles Ave. E. in Scarborough. The RCMP’s National-Anti Counterfeiting Bureau (NACB) confirmed the coins were counterfeit.
On Oct. 2, 2021, Mr. He deposited 500 two-dollar coins into an HSBC account, located at 6025 Steeles Ave. E., Scarborough. The NACB confirmed those coins were fakes.
On Nov. 8, 2021, the RCMP observed Mr. He deposit a large amount of cash and 3,001 two-dollar coins, at the RBC located at 6021 Steeles Ave. E., Scarborough. Again, the NACB confirmed the coins were counterfeit.
On Nov. 12, 2021, Mr. He deposited 500 two-dollar coins into an account at the BMO located at 1 Spadina Rd, in Richmond Hill, Ontario. BMO officials examined those coins and deemed them counterfeits. The RCMP then inspected the coins, also concluded they were counterfeit and seized them.
In the period before the police and Mint began seizing confirmed counterfeit coins, RCMP investigators learned, Mr. He made similarly large $2 coin deposits totaling approximately $80,000, or about 40,000 toonies that were suspected fakes, making it the biggest fake toonie case in Canadian history.
Mr. He did not admit to making the Camel Toe fake toonies.
Rather, he admitted that because of the circumstances of how he received the coins — which were not revealed to the court — he ought to have exercised more caution before depositing them and was therefore willfully blind when he used the counterfeit money.
Asked if his client was a member of an organized crime group, lawyer Thomas Richards replied: “I can tell you there was no information in the disclosure (of the police evidence by the Crown attorney) that would tie him to organized crime. It was just simply him.”
Thomas declined to say where Mr. He obtained his fake toonies, but then added: “There was a person of interest that the police were interested in pinning this on. He was illegal in Canada but couldn’t be removed or deported because his passport expired. So, he was continuing to operate in perhaps a criminal manner inside Canada, known to police, but CBSA (Canada Border Services Agency) couldn’t remove him because he didn’t have a valid travel document.”
Thomas declined to name this person of interest or nationality, but insisted: “That’s the real story.”
Richards said that this person has not been charged, as far as he knows.
“He’s the real story. He is a known criminal,” Richards said.
The person without legal status in Canada was detained by the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency and an attempt to deport him was made. But because the person didn’t have a passport or other travel document, and because their country of origin was either unable or unwilling to provide a new travel document to him in a timely way, the CBSA was forced to release him from its custody, and the person remains at large inside Canada.
CBSA can detain people without legal status in Canada for periods ranging from 48 hours to 30 days to prepare deportation proceedings against them, but must get permission from a federal immigration tribunal to extend that detention.
“He’s out there, the police know he’s a criminal, but they can’t do anything,” Richards added.
Global News asked the Mounties about the lawyer’s comments and whether another suspect was linked to the Toronto fake toonie case who remains at large. An RCMP spokesman did not deny it and said: “Only in the event that an investigation results in the laying of criminal charges, would the RCMP confirm the identity of individual(s) involved. Therefore, I cannot provide further information.”
Richards declined to share further details about Mr. He including his occupation, or the other person of interest, saying his client had “a right to remain mostly anonymous.”
The Royal Canadian Mint began sampling big bank-supplied boxes filled with 1,000 $2 coins in the Toronto area in the summer of 2021 to determine the extent of the counterfeiting operation. That was long after Canadian coin collectors complained of a tsunami of counterfeit toonies that had landed in the GTA in July 2020. The Mint has until this day refused to publicly disclose the results of its own coin sampling efforts.
Internal Mint documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show it did share and forward its coin sampling findings — the percentage of fakes it was finding in $1,000 boxes of coins — with the RCMP to advance the criminal investigation that led to charges against Daixiong He.
The Royal Canadian Mint in 2021 was quietly sampling boxes of 500 $2 coins to detect fake Toonies and counterfeits. The Crown Corporation has kept its results secret.
Royal Canadian Mint photo obtained byGlobal News
Coin collectors in the Toronto region were already doing their own amateur sampling of the same boxes of toonie rolls of coins, which can be ordered from banks. Numismatic enthusiasts were coming up with five fakes in every box of 500 coins, a one per cent counterfeit rate.
The flood of fake toonies in the GTA — which eventually spread across Canada and continue to circulate to this day — caused the Mint to draft a special plan to manage “a contamination in the circulation coinage system,” according to a Mint document that outlines its provisions.
The Mint and an entity called the Canadian Circulation Coin Distribution System even have a policy guide on how to manage the “contamination” of the Canadian circulating coin environment when counterfeit coins are detected, the Access to Information documents reveal.
An Internal Mint document shows how it manages a counterfeit coin “contamination” in Canada. It states the “magnitude (size) of the contamination informs the course of action.”
The internal Royal Canadian Mint documents suggest the federal Crown corporation has minted or manufactured more than one billion $2 coins since 1996, when 375.5 million of them were made. The Mint started manufacturing $1 coins, or loonies in 1987.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
