While cashing a check today at the bank, the teller at the drive-through window held up a bill and told the driver that it was counterfeit. I didn’t get to see the drivers reaction. But when I said I’d never seen that happen, my teller went and got it so I could see. The bill looked like it had been through the wash and the ink had run. I would have accepted it thinking that it was just a bill in bad shape. When I said this, the tellers told me that a real bill will not run, just get a little wrinkled. Now that I know, I’ll be careful about any 20’s that folks try to give me in change.
It was obvious once I knew it was a fake bill. But otherwise, my ignorance would have cost me.
When I worked armored, a couple of times a year I’d pick up a bundle from the bank in a special package marked “counterfeit”. We’d take them back to their main vault, and from there they’d be turned over to the feds.
One nice stack of solid $20’s in one. Only they looked off. Not the depth of color or the paper quality of regular bills. Clear they were mass produced on a copy machine.
I’ve been a cashier for about 20 years. I saw my first fake about 15 years ago. It was TERRIBLE - clearly copied on a fricking standard Xerox machine - white bond paper, runny “ink.” The dude who gave it to me was clearly the one who made it, and didn’t stick around for the cops. I caught it before the transaction was complete, so we lost nothing, and I was able to keep the bill for the cops because the guy spooked and left it.
Over the last 6 years or so, I’ve had maybe 4-5 fakes come at me at the register - I’m sure I caught them all. A couple of fake hundreds that just “felt wrong” to my fingers. Then, when I checked the security features, they were all wrong. I got one Fifty recently that was a really, really good fake. The security features were close, just barely “off” enough that I actually went so far as to check for the red and blue fibers in the paper, and they weren’t there. The guy quickly gave me something else, so I suspect he knew. I’ve received 2 or 3 hundreds printed on bleached-out fives - they remove the ink from a low denom, then print the higher denom on it, which gives the correct paper and finger-feel. But the watermark is wrong, so it’s easy to spot if you know what to look for. Once, I got one of those from my manager’s scumbag son-in-law. He came in to defraud me (I’m sure he knew), and his mother-in-law just happened to have stayed late that day, and was right next to me. I looked at it, said, “Hey, Manager, this is fake, right?” The kid almost shit.
Unfortunately, I also have come across a few fakes while counting our daily deposit - the other employees are not as vigilant as I am, I suppose. Sometimes, I wonder if we have blind, fingerless monkeys working for us, considering the low quality of fakes they take…
Our paper currency may be boring as hell but it’s well-made and about as resilient as possible. Surprisingly fine detail remains in the engravings even after the paper has become soft with age: Any fuzziness or especially smudging is a very good sign the bill is fake. That’s true of all our currency made in the modern era.
On a new bill, the watermarks, embedded strip, and the color-shifting ink are completely unaffected by age and functionally impossible to copy.* You should be able to see all of these when you hold a genuine $20 up to a good light:
[ul]
[li]The strip runs vertically and says USA TWENTY. Even if you can’t read the small text, it will be visible as a solid vertical line.[/li][li]The watermarks are visible on either side as a pattern of shadows that resolve into very vague portraits of Jackson.[/li][li]The ‘20’ in the bottom-right corner of the front of the bill should shift color when moved around in the light.[/li][/ul]
*(If you ever get a counterfeit that good, you’ll never know it. Don’t worry about it.)
I worked at an amusement park one summer a few years ago, and I worked in an area where we just made change out of our aprons, without cash registers. The managers hammered it into us that we had to check all bills to see if they were counterfeit, which seemed bizarre to me until I started catching them. I think I saw about 10 counterfeit bills over the summer - most were 20s, one was a 10, I believe, and one 50. They told us to hold each 20 to the light to see the green bar in the corner turn gold (this is Canadian money) and to check the watermark, but the people telling you to do all that obviously didn’t have to handle hundreds of bills each hour with people swarming all around - I got really good at just rubbing the shoulder of the queen or whoever with my thumbnail, and if I didn’t feel the ridges, I checked all the other things. Counterfeit money just felt like ordinary paper. It took about two years before I could stop checking every bill I touched the same way, which meant I offended a lot of cashiers!
I still remember one woman who handed me a $10 to pay for her daughter to play a $3 game (God I hated working games!). I checked it, and low and behold it was counterfeit. I had no doubt that she had gotten it in the park, since the place mainly employed stupid 15-year-olds who weren’t as good about checking as me, and I never accused her of anything. But she went off the rails, screaming at me, practically frothing at the mouth. She had me backed against a wall, and I finally managed to get a manager over for her to spit on. She left, and I kind of laughed from the release of tension. She came back and continued screaming at me, saying I was a miserable little BITCH who just wanted to deny her child anything. My hands were shaking for about two hours afterward. I felt really sorry for her daughter - imagine living with that anger all the time.
Ohhhhh, I wish you had a video or at least a pic of his face when he realized who was standing next to you. I imagine that family gatherings were very Interesting for a while after that.
So…what do you do with the counterfeit bill if you catch it at the time of transaction? Say it is counterfeit and hand it back…or are you required to keep and report it?
In this case the teller told the customer that she would give them a receipt for it. Why they would do this I can only guess. Probably to provide documentation that the bank is not cheating the customer out of $20. Just removing a bogus bill.
This is true - I have had bills inadvertently go through the wash and the only thing that happens is that they come out cleaner - the ink does not run at all.
Ironing doesn’t hurt them either, and does get the wrinkles out. You could probably use the “linen” setting, but I’ve had good results using “cotton” temps with some steam.
My mom was a bank teller years ago (like, 38-40 years ago) and she was a whiz at pulling fake bills by feel. She was fast, too- flip-flip-flip-flip-PULL-flip-flip-flip-flip. Used to be mostly $50s.
I know a guy who claims that he printed up 2 $100 bills on his high end printer using some rather expensive paper from Kinko’s.
Don’t know if I believe him, but he did claim that he pulled it off at a casino, stating that he picked there due to the high volume of money movement.
I narrowly missed taking a fake hundred many years ago when I worked in a bookstore. Someone walked into the store and asked if I could change a hundred. I told them no and they turned around and left.
The next day I found out they had returned and tried it again with the next shift and gotten their change. Then the bank kicked the bill out.
Every time someone scrutinizes a bill I give them, I wonder this exact thing. I’m no counterfeiter. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t come by my cash from any location that would give me fake-o money. But what the heck do I do if a cashier hands me cash back and says, “This is fake.” Am I in trouble at that point? Do I just lose that money because I’ve been stupid enough to be taken by a counterfeiter? I assume so. I’d be hopping mad at that point. And there’d be no one to blame.
Few things are more exciting to me than watching a bank teller at work. They are absolutely amazing people and I am absolutely certain that some degree of black magic goes into what they do.
Bank employees are federally required to confiscate the bill and provide a receipt if the person asks for it. We were not supposed to ever give it back to the customer. We had to document things such as where the think they might have received the bill. Then everything was sent to the Secret Service. The customer was basically out the cost of bill. Business owners can probably legally refuse the accept the bill and return it to the customer. If they inadvertently accept one, the only legal response is to take the loss.
I work at a bank and we see counterfeits almost on a daily basis. While some are very easy to spot because of smeared ink, glossy and slick paper or blurry images, some are very good.
Not all counterfeits are like this but if you look at any bill, you’ll see the serial number – two letters followed by eight numbers and then another letter. What appears underneath this serial number is important.
For example, say you have a bill that has this serial number: IB46912871A
Underneath the serial number is a letter followed by a number. Using the example above, the second letter is a B. Since the second letter of the serial number is a B, that letter B must also appear the serial followed by a 2 since B is the second letter of the alphabet.
I have seen fake 50s that would have the serial number like the one above but then have E5 below it.
However, some counterfeits like 100s are way better except for some very small differences. We’re talking in spaces between letters here!
A while back one of my co-workers received a counterfeit 20 in change from a McDonalds. I don’t remember if he stopped somewhere else and they told him it was fake, or if he figured it out himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do about it, and our boss kept urging him to call the police. Eventually the boss called the police himself. An officer showed up, took the bill, said “yep that’s fake”, and left. My co-worker was pissed because he didn’t get reimbursed by the cop or the McDonalds when he went back up to complain. He said if he had just tried to pass it off on someone else, he wouldn’t have been out $20.
A number of years ago I was about to drive through one of NYC’s tunnels. I paid with a 20, and got pulled over because the two serial numbers didn’t match. Apparently it was two different bills (both 20s) spliced together, with a thin area missing. Someone was going to a lot of trouble to put together a new 20 from little strips. Or something like that. The thing is, though, I had just gotten that bill from my bank (not the ATM).
