Tourists used €1 coins to pay hotel

TWO Chinese tourists ended up in the cells after they tried to pay their €70 hotel bill with one-euro coins.

The couple had been staying at a small hotel in Bagnolet (Seine-Saint-Denis) when the manager became suspicious. They had paid for their first night’s stay with coins but when they tried to pay again for the next night he called the police.

Officers from the fraud squad arrived and searched the couple’s room – where they found around 3,000 other euro coins that the pair had brought from China in their luggage. The coins weighed 22.5kg – and police discovered the man was also carrying 700 coins himself, weighing 5.5kg.

The two Chinese were taken to the Brigade de Recherches et d’Investigations Financières offices in Paris for questioning.

They told police they had bought the coins from a Chinese scrapyard where workers were breaking up European cars for recycling and regularly found Euro coins lost in the vehicles.

The couple were later freed.