I handle the banking for the store that I work at. Despite taking precautions, a counterfeit bill slips through the cracks every once in a while. They’re almost always discovered when I go to the bank to make a deposit.
Anyway, that happened last night which I discovered at the bank today and instead of telling me it’s fake and immediately doing a report on it like they usually do, the teller stage whispers to me that it’s a fake- writes “FAKE” on it in pen- and gives it back to me. I said, “Really?” and held it up to look at it when she told me to put it away and not let anyone else see. I gave it back to her and asked for the report which she seemed a bit put out by- I apologized for the hassle and told her that I just have to have documentation for missing money.
As she was filling it out she told me that she didn’t give it back to me so I could “wave it around” (doing hand motions mimicking me), she was trying to do me a favor because the store “doesn’t have to report the loss” if I don’t document it. That doesn’t make any sense, and report the loss to who anyway? I was baffled and kept trying to explain that missing money is missing money and I need a paper trail otherwise I could potentially be on the hook for it.
She was being so condescending that I ended up apologizing again and told her that maybe it doesn’t make sense, but that’s just how our store does it. Her other line of reasoning was that “the other guy” who used to handle bank transactions would take the money back (the people at my store have been going to the same bank branch for a few years so we all know each other). Well, the other guy was fired for theft a while back- he was skimming money off the register and probably just spent the fake money somewhere else.
So anyway- am I correct in that it’s standard bank procedure to document counterfeit bills? They’ve always done that for me without me asking so I thought it was bank policy- it worked the same way when I worked for another company and we did our deposits at the same bank (different branch- this is a major New York bank). And what could she have meant about us not having to report the loss? I guess this is a matter of a opinion- maybe I was a moron for holding the fake bill up, but I think it was her fault for doing something that could potentially get her fired (I would imagine) and just assuming I knew what she was up to.
To make it worse, she was very snarky and went way over the top with her fake bill report- instead of just giving me this sheet :Secret Service Counterfeit Bill Form, she also wrote a note on official bank stationery that “[My name] made x deposit on this date with this fake bill, etc” and made a big show of sealing it up in an official envelope.
This happened about 12 hours ago, the bank security footage may be gone by now. I would hate for this to become a “she said, she said” thing, especially since she did a proper report in the end. I’m still curious as to what her motives could have been though- the explanation didn’t make much sense.
As she was filling it out she told me that she didn’t give it back to me so I could “wave it around” (doing hand motions mimicking me), she was trying to do me a favor because the store “doesn’t have to report the loss” if I don’t document it. That doesn’t make any sense, and report the loss to who anyway? I was baffled and kept trying to explain that missing money is missing money and I need a paper trail otherwise I could potentially be on the hook for it.
If you’re missing something here so am I. A loss is a loss is a loss. Report what to whom? Basically, I’m entering this comment because I’m curious now and It seemed simpler tha remembering how to elsewise subscribe to a thread.
WAG: The dame’s loopy & you’d do the bank a favor to inquire.
I don’t get it… What else would you do with it? If you try to pass it along to someone else, you’re a felon… Are you supposed to frame it and put it up on the wall? Isn’t it illegal merely to possess counterfeit money?
That’s what I thought, Trinopus****. Either a) she’s crazy or b) there was something funny going on with “the other guy” that I’m unaware of. I guess there’s also c) lazy and didn’t want to do the paperwork. I was just wondering if there was anything remotely factual about her statements.
I used to be a bank teller and came across counterfeit bills myself. Big banks have their own fraud divisions and are very interested in counterfeit bills. I would have also gotten into a lot of trouble if I had marred the bill by writing on it! Using a counterfeit pen in a corner is one thing, writing FAKE on it is something else entirely. The fraud people want to be able to analyze it if it’s a good one, and how it’s made can help them determine if it came from the same source as other confiscated bills.
Honestly, the second that teller tried to hand it back to me, I would have gotten a manager. What she did was entirely weird from start to finish.
Any chance the teller switched that bill for another before writing FAKE on it? She could have been covering up a phony bill she accepted from someone else, either to cover up her own mistake, or to do a favor for that customer. In that case she would want to be avoiding attention for the activity.
I always thought it was funny when I ran a cash business and they never checked the $50 and $100 bills. I figured they must keep them in the order they’re received and record that somehow to trace them back if bad bills were detected later. Maybe they didn’t care, it was only BofA.
My guess is that she was proposing that you take the bill back to the store and let it slip back into circulation, thereby saving your employer that loss. And that she thought she was doing you (or your boss) a favor.
But if that were the case, I don’t know why she would have written “fake” on it.
I highly doubt the order was recorded. That would be a huge mound of paper work. They either ran it through a machine that counted the bills and caught counterfeits. Or the risk of a loss was of a lesser concern than efficiency. The texture of a bill is also hard to reproduce, so they may have caught one that way. The song and dance that some clerks do of holding it up to the light and marking it may be excessive, and just to show patrons that they do check. I don’t remember having any of those pens in the bank, or at least never used them.
They do in fact get excited over a single bill, but only if there is information about who produced it. We had Secret Service participation on search warrants coming from investigations involving one bill. They usually let the prosecutions go forward on the local level unless they uncover a big operation.
No it’s not illegal to just have a counterfeit bill.
So what’s the point of that? Are the cashier’s supposed to have a training session where they examine the bill for defects so that if a similar bill comes in, they can reject it?
If I’m a store owner, I would rather have counterfeit money out of my hands, to the Secret Service, instead of having some half-assed training scheme which would likely end up with one of my 16 year old minimum wage clerks rejecting legitimate bills and pissing customers off.
As other posters have said, no matter what, you are out the value of the fake bill. Why wouldn’t you want to report that as a loss for tax purposes?
Maybe she was giving it to me for the purpose of putting it up, but she could have explained that to me instead of acting like I was a complete idiot and coming up with bizarre reasons about the “loss.” And it was a $20 bill anyway, it’s not like we’re going to go under from losing $20. All my bosses care about is that there’s a reasonable and documented explanation for missing money, even if it’s a small amount like $20.
Everyone who handles money at the store has a general idea of what a fake bill looks like anyway, usually someone’s just in a hurry or isn’t paying attention and that’s how we get them.
Those pens are either security theater or simple fraud. They work by using iodine to detect starch (which causes iodine to change color). Cheap copy paper is made with starch, and the paper used in banknotes doesn’t, but it’s trivially easy for counterfeiters to use starchless paper or for anyone like James Randi to demonstrate false positives by spraying real bills with laundry starch. Any fake bills made with paper that would react to one of those pens isn’t likely to look or feel much like real currency anyway.
Right, and holding a bill up to the light isn’t a “song and dance,” it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to detect a fake note: looking for the watermark that most genuine bills around the world have, including, finally, some US bills.