I frequent a gas station in Washington D.C. daily and lately the lady has been getting fake hundred dollar bills. What is happening is they are either bleaching or somehow erasing five dollar bills and printing hundred dollar faces on them. Because the strip that’s in them states, “US FIVE DOLLARS US FIVE DOLLARS”. They are exceptionally good looking I might add.
Well, the lady speaks broken english and was rather upset about it, so I told her to call the Secret Service. She couldn’t make out what I was saying, OR she is not a legal alien. Either way, she asked me to take care of it. Weird, I know, but we are good buddies.
I called The Secret Service and reported the case about three months ago. The agent said, “we’ll send someone right out there, sir. Thank you for the report !”
To this day, the lady says nobody has come by, not even local police.
Why would The Secret Service lie to me and then not check into this? Do they only handle large counterfeiting rings or something?
Is this comparable to the DEA busting someone with a dimebag of weed?
Hmm. I would have suspected that whatever bank that lady makes deposits to would have contacted the Secret Service. (I would assume that she did not catch every fake bill.) Did she talk to them?
First off, she needs to be checking them before she accepts them. At my store, they have a pen to make sure the bill is real, but for $50 and $100 they are supposed to be holding them up to the light and actually reading the print on the strip.
As for the ones she already has. Just contact the local police and let them deal with it. That’s what we do.
The pen is worthless, it gives a false sense of security to the cashier is all it does. Real money reused as bigger bills fool that worthless pen all the time. Always use the watermarks etc.
We do that…as I mentioned in my post. The marker is a ‘first line of defense’ so to speak. Why strain your eyes to see the strip if the marker will show it as fake first. Besides, IME it’s rare to find $1, $5 or $20 as bleached and reprinted. Those are usually just printed on regular paper to begin with. So we only make our cashiers check the strip/watermark on $50 and $100 bills.
ETA The marker is far from useless. It does a great job of catching bills that are printed on regular paper, no matter how well they are printed.
But since the OP already called the SS and they arn’t responding, I would suggest calling the local police and letting them deal with it. Perhaps they can get a better response from the SS.
Believe it or not, a lot of PD’s will show up and tell the person to call the SS (again if need be). They won’t even touch the bill or open any case file on it.
Your location says Milwaukee. I honestly don’t know what MPD does.