Dollartree uses the pen on $10. Around here.
I believe this is because of undetectable (to us humans) tiny spots of yellow which identify the “paper” as a bank note. Photoshop does something similar, making it quite tough to alter even the image of a bank note.
I think it is named the Orion constellation, as something of a riff off the actual star constellation, but, not being too well versed in the art of forgery… I’m not certain.
On this slight tangent: I was in Shanghai when 36 people were killed when fake money was thrown into a crowd at new year’s eve.
That was a plot point of the first Jack Reacher novel.(Now on Amazon Prime!)
Right, but if you confiscate the bill you are going to have to deal with an irate customer, and that will cause a scene and tie up management that has other things they need to do. Oh, we are there to handle problems, but we also have other run- of- the- mill duties to accomplish.
If they are legitimately the one who got conned, they will be upset, but at least you aren’t the one that cheated them. If you confiscate the bill, then you are the one stealing their money in their mind.
I am reminded of Mister 880 who counterfeited one dollar bills. He only passed a single bill to any one person, all within a fairly small area. It took the FBI a decade to catch him.
What the Secret Service wants, and what they demand are miles apart- they certainly dont want some clerk getting killed over a fake $20.
But if the bills are found AFTERWARDS, they will appreciate getting them, with that info.
It wasn’t the clerk…
The most well known and weird counterfeit coin are the Henning nickels, made in the 1950s. He created nickels with several dates, including 1944. Nickels from that year had a special alloy including silver, since nickel was vital for the military in WWII. To mark the special alloy, a large mintmark was placed over Monticello’s dome. Henning had neglected to include the large mintmark, giving away the game. It didn’t help him that he actually lost money on each nickel (kind of like our country’s current nickel fiasco).
You can find them on eBay!
There’s a Harry Bosch novel where a movie director insists on a large volume of cash for a robbery scene, claiming realism requires real money. In spite of heavy security on the set, the money truck is knocked off by armed hoodlums.
The British Museum has a couple Doctor Who prop bank notes. They’re from a Christmas episode with Catherine Tate.
I noticed some gold bars in the shopping cart of a another customer at an Asian grocery a couple weeks ago, gold is flashy! Luckily, I held off swiping them because I later saw a display of joss gold and banknotes. The US $100s (there were other currencies & types) were certainly funny looking but marginally passable at a distance or, say, raining inside a moneybooth. I’d have had fun with them as a kid, hiding them in annoying places.
Are they really? This Fed study estimates the share of counterfeit bills to be on the order of 1 counterfeit one for every 80,000 genuine ones. If we assume an adult life of 60 years, you’d have to handle about four banknotes every day, including weekends, to go through 80,000 of them over a lifetime. I don’t think most people would manage to do that.
Well, maybe not as common as it used to be, but in the past people used cash far, far more often and that does not strike me as an unreasonable average.
Back in the day, you had to get in line at the bank on Friday to get cash. For significant purchases, people wrote checks. If you walked into a store with a checkbook in your pocket, the salesmen would swoop.
Indeed– the cited study itself suggests the frequency may have gone down by an order of magnitude in the last 20 years.
Anyone old enough to have had a job handling cash 20 years ago has likely encountered counterfeits.
…then the probability is going to sharply drop off for the young uns. Nowadays a lot of the time we’re not even handling cash, period. (In fact I never have cash any more, but I’m based in the UK. From my understanding, the US is not quite as cashless yet)
In some nations, many of the 100s are counterfeit.
But here in the USA, this seems correct. Mind you every big store has seen a few, mostly the really bad ones.
Well, yeah, but even a grocery store clerk likely handles many hundred bills a day.
It’s impossible to say how many of the outstanding ones they have seen.