When two Chinese tourists tried to pay their hotel bill with one-euro coins, the police were called.
The owner of the Parisian hotel became suspicious when the men began to count out 70 euro coins to meet the charge, the same way they had paid for their bill the previous evening.
The police counted out 3,700 one-euro coins in their hotel room and held the pair briefly on suspicion of forgery.
Banking experts, however, checked the coins and confirmed that they were real.
The men said they had got the money from scrap metal dealers in China, who often find forgotten euros in cars sent from Europe. It was later established that the men had bought the coins from friends in the trade.
Thousands of cars are shipped every year from Europe to China for scrap and are fully searched before demolition.
Perhaps they saved on bank charges for converting yuans into euros, but lugging around bags weighted down with thousands of euros must have still been a hefty exchange.
