Any counterfeit bill stories?

[dbblsanta]

I have never received a counterfeit bill, but I'm curious to hear from those who have. How did you know it was counterfeit, how did you handle the situation, how did the customer react, and what resulted?

The thought of seeing stupid customers being handcuffed and taken away must excite me... (although I realize that not everyone who spends a counterfeit necessarily knows it's counterfeit).

[Evil Queen]

I got a fake a couple weeks ago now. Fake twenty. I had gave the guy the price of the room and he was short some money so he went to the ATM down the street. When he got back, he handed me a stack of 20s. Running my pen over the bills, one of them came back fake.

I told him so, handed the bill back to him and told him to take it to the bank that owned the ATM. He apologized. The look on his face? Priceless.

Unfortunately I haven't seen him since. Darn.

[Zell]

No, but I did get a one dollar bill with a B in front of the O and an R after the E.

I laughed.

[Ghel]

Six or seven years ago, we had a counterfeit $50 come in in the deposit for one of the local bars. We can only assume that the bartender was as drunk as the patrons, since every teller who inspected the bill could easily tell it was fake. It felt different. Like it had been run off on a color photocopier. We ended up making a police report, but there was no way of tracing which of the bar's customers had passed it.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

I didn't actually see it done with my own two eyes, but a guy I know got hauled off to jail for some time for making funny money at a local Kinkos.

Seriously.

He was counterfeiting on a Kinko's copy machine.

Now, I don't know how this worked, because he must've overridden the mechanism that prevents the copying of money (yes, there is one). Alls I know is that it happened at one of the other Kinkos, and he got arrested and did time.

I wonder if that's on the internet somewhere. I'll go look.

Oh, yeah, that and we discovered that my coworker at Public TV had a fake 20 in his pocket when he got rained on. He called the cops and they came out to get it. I don't know what happened from there. Ink on the bill ran all over the place.

EDIT: I bet this is it: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/08/1342209
Except it wasn't a university machine, it was a machine in the Kinkos on the university campus. Unless there was more than one case, which I doubt. Apparently, it WAS at the university Kinkos. I didn't work there when it went down.

[portia911]

No bills, but in the UK I was given a counterfeit one pound coin. Bizarre. I mean why would you bother doing that with coins? It would cost so much for so little return

[DeltaSierra]

Not really a "counterfeit" story, but a humorous incident happened to my Mom. She had a OBVIOUSLY fake $10 note in her purse that a friend had given her as a joke, which included several nude firemen on the front of it. She accidentally handed it to the cashier at the gas station one night. What made it even funnier was the cashier said "Oh my Grandma has the same one!" Mom was mortified.

[crashhelmet]

We had two bikers from the same gang try to pass off $100.00 bills one right after the other and right next to eachother.

I checked them with the pen and they passed, but while looking them over, I noticed that the serial numbers were similar. When I looked a little closer, I noticed that they were exactly the same.

I was lucky enough to have some Sheriff's Deputies in our restaraunt eating so we were able to have them arrested. If not, they would've gotten away.

I'm just glad I didn't eat the cost of the $200 I would've been out.

CH

[Imogene]

Yup, had some guy hand me a $100 for a box of Prismacolors, and I could immediately tell it was fake, even before checking the security features. The face was printed at what looked like 95% the bill's size, so there was some really huge borders around the thing, plus, it was thicker than normal. Then I checked the security features, and saw Abe Lincoln staring at me.
Told the guy I would have to call a manager, it's fake. Guy gets pissed. "I just sold a motor bike on Craig's list...". He offers to step out of my growing line, and hold on to the bill while we waited, so I could continue to ring people. Soon as I started my next customer, guy says, "I gotta go tell my wife!" and bolts.
Both MoDs show up at the same time, and ask what I want. "Too late now... he bolted." And I hand them the Prismacolors to get locked back up.

[Leopardmadcat]

RecoveringKinkoid - that's an OLD article. Color printers nowadays will automatically include a 'hidden' barcode at the bottom of your letter printed in ultralight yellow, almost impossible to see. The older color printers were a lot more visible, caused a real headache at my drafting job cause the boss always wanted to know why this yellow was at the bottom of our graphs... *Shakes fist at treasury department*

---

I've never found a fake bill myself, but my friend the 'gas jockey' got stuck with a pair of fake 5's... done in marvelous...

CRAYON!

Kay it was winter, -30C. exhaust fog everywhere. and he was wearing mits. I'll cut him some slack... and then laugh my ass off at him!

---

My Dad collects bills and coins, and he even has a fake Loonie!

(Canadian $1 coin)
This MUST have cost more to make than it's face value...

[Meganjo23]

I've never seen a counterfiet at any of my jobs, but we did have someone use a dollar bill the other day with "F-CK YOU *NAME*" written on it in permanent marker. Obviously we still took it, and just didn't hand it back to anyone.

I like to think that some guy went into a strip club and saw his girlfriend dancing, and decided to express with displeasure by writing that and slipping the dollar in her thong. Cause, you kow, that's the only classy thing to do in that situation.

[lordlundar]

My Dad collects bills and coins, and he even has a fake Loonie!

(Canadian $1 coin)
This MUST have cost more to make than it's face value...

<Looks at real one>

Where's the fake in it? It looks identical.

As for me, not that I've personally caught. MY manager spotted one. Bleeding ink kind of says funny money to everyone int the vicinity.

[Anakah]

I have an awesome story involving fake traveler checks.

My co worker got a guy who brought up $5500 dollars worth of VISA five hundred dollar checks. Now, Visa, does NOT make anything higher than 100 dollar ones. So watch out.

Anyway, I didn't get to see the whole thing but the guy stayed in the window while they were investigating. He must have either been an idiot or someone sold him those checks or paid him in them.

Either way, he gave his ID and put his social down on the table. I don't understand why he left his social there though. That is uneeded. CW was in the back and I got to see one. The color was faded and there was a weird strip on it, not one I have ever seen and the guy signed the check different.

So, CW is hiding in the back while security is being called. They took forever which is stupid considering it was a slow day and they are located RIGHT next to us.

Supervisor ran out the door and demanded their supervisor. We had a potential felon standing there and who knows if he freaked out what could happen.

Finally, a security guard comes up to the FRONT of the cage and asks ME whats going on! I am counting in right next to where the traveler check guy is standing!

I tell him with wide eyes to go into the back and get is ass into the cage. But I say it nicer.

Finally, I get to see the head honcho security guard tell the guy they're calling the cops and he needs to go with them.

WHY would you do that? It was sooo stupid. They looked really bad too, anybody could've caught it and he brought such a high amount, which called attention. Idiots.

[the toy guy]

I had a similar experience with a traveler's check last year.

A guy came into my section to make a purchase with a $500 Amex check. I didn't know, at the time, that Amex doesn't make that denomination, but I had some other reasons for suspicion:

1. The total of the transaction was less than $5.

2. The guy claimed that he didn't have any I.D.

3. The "pay to" line on the check had Best Buy crossed out and our store written in.

I called for the MOD, telling the guy that I wasn't sure how to process the check (true, it was the first and only time I've encountered one), and that I didn't have enough money for change (also true).

MOD came and took the check into the office to call it in. After about five minutes I followed her and asked what was taking so long. She said that Amex had told her to call the police.

I went back out, told the "customer" that we were having trouble with the phones, and that it would be just a bit longer. He waited another 20 minutes before finally getting suspicious and leaving. Just as he was walking out the door, a cop walked in past him. I frantically waved and pointed through the door, and a few moments later the guy was led back into the store buy a second cop.

I don't have any details on what followed, because MOD sent me to the back after giving my side to the police. However, I did glance up front just in time to see the guy being led out in handcuffs.

[Evil Queen]

I was going through my Dossier de merde (File of Shit) from work when I stumbled across the photo copy of a fake American Express Travelers's Check.

How do I know it was fake? It looked so real and how do you check? Well....

It said WELLS FARGO on it. uh... AMEX Traveler's Check's don't have bank names on them! DUH!