You may also have seen an image of one on social media 7 euro coin which “should enter into circulation in the European Union from January 1, 2024″. As intrigued as some were by the news, this is nothing more than one of many fake news that circulate on the web: the ECB in fact never had any plans to introduce this coinage. The photos that are circulating are therefore the result of fervent imagination, a desire for end-of-year pranks and a not too discreet use of photo editing (the design is the same as the 2 euro coin, but a 7 has been “photoshopped” instead of the 2).
Yet, the news of the issuing of the fake currency reached a myriad of people for a reason: whoever circulated the news was careful to say that it would have been minted by the House from Moeda Portuguese, i.e. the equivalent of State Mint Italian. It goes without saying that when you go to the site in question you cannot find any trace of the 7 euro coin. The news didn’t even seem so strange to some users, however, and for two reasons.
The first is that some Portuguese users seeing the “7” put one and one together and thought it was a tribute to the Portuguese football champion Cristiano Ronaldowho has the number seven as his shirt number (CR7). The second reason – which made the news more credible – is that two years ago the Casa da Moeda had issued a coin with a nominal value of 7.50 euros (to be precise, 25,000 pieces representing important monuments of cities in Spain and South America) with the approval of ordinance number 440, e Precisely for this reason the news of the 7 euro coin seemed credible. Here too, it was a commemorative coin, for a man who lived a few centuries ago: the famous explorer Ferdinand Magellanwhich 500 years earlier had circumnavigated the globe.
However, if the commemorative coin for Magellan really existed, the one for the CR7 – if it ever exists – will have to wait a little longer!
