Actually when the Loss Prevention guys gave us teller trainees their speech, they told us the $5 is the most counterfeited bill, and is usually passed at convenience stores rather than banks. Banks are a bad place to pass counterfeits because the tellers are so very accustomed to what real mony looks like and have lots of training and tools to detect fakes. Banks are more popular for laundering.
I had one suspected counterfeit in a summer of fulltime work. It turned out to be real (just printed during the Depression, hence the strange color) but I got a kick out of calling the Secret Service.
That’s how I was taught to do it when I worked at a bank. The woman who taught me used to work in a casino, where they apparently also handle large amounts of cash. Who knew?
In my 10 years of amsement park I saw about 15, most of them in a few month period. They were actually turning up in our arcade token dispensers. Some enterprising individual made some that fooled the bill acceptors. The readers were replaced with newer acceptor units that were not vulnerable to that type of counterfeit.
The ones in question were old optical ones that read a thin strip of the bill like a type of barcode. AFAIK nobody uses the optical ones much anymore due to this vulnerability
My wife (the teller) says that they are trained to count 20s’ as 2,4,6,8,10,12,14 etc and then add a zero onto the end of that. 10s’ as 1,2,3,4…the same way.
She added that she doesn’t count the way she was trained and that they always count at least twice.
