Notably, if you have a counterfeit dollar bill it's the secret service that deals with it.
I've read of someone who worked at a bank who was told that after getting a counterfeit, looked them up in the phone book, and they dealt with it promptly.
Fun fact: you are asking the wrong branch of the government.
The Secret Service will happily tell you about security features of currency, and behind closed doors help you build methods to detect counterfeits if you have a reasonable justification.
No but the Secret Service absolutely will. The FBI doesn't deal with counterfeit currency. But it is actually the primary reason the Secret Service exists.
Years ago a friend got a fake $20 from an ATM and reported it to the Secret Service. I don't remember the details, but he told me the Secret Service really hassled him for a while. So it's probably best just to throw the fake bill in the garbage (or burn it to be sure).
One of the reasons places like that can accept these bills is they aggressively pursue counterfeiters and have the budget to do so. Like having a security team. They don’t just “take the L” if they get a counterfeit bill.
When I was security at Target the most exciting thing I did was work with the Secret Service (who are also responsible for catching counterfeiters) who would come from their downtown office and pick up the counterfeit bills we’d sometimes receive. Oddly enough for awhile we were getting counterfeit $5 bills. We wouldn’t catch those until we put it into the money counting/scanning machine at night in the safe room, though.
Hear, hear. It's particularly ridiculous since some large portion of the people who end up with a counterfeit bill have no idea that it's fake...
Once I pulled out a bunch of cash in a bar and exactly one bill, a $5, glowed brightly under the black light in the bar. I'd already handed it to the bar owner and I said, "Oh, that one must be a fake, I'll take it back" and he said, "No, it's fine." I was surprised!
(Under my fingers too, it was an obvious fake, but I didn't react in time.)
I was a bank teller in college and I'd probably see a fake $100 or $20 at least once a week. It got really, really easy to tell after about 3-4 months of handling tens of thousands of dollars a day (I deleted it long ago, but I at one point had a photo of me juggling three $100,000 bricks of $100 dollar bills, incredibly stupid thing to take a picture of while at work in the vault, but I was 19 and didn't know any better).
9/10 times the counterfeit bill owner had no idea as they were mostly in cash deposits from local restaurants and whatnot. But 1/10 you could tell the person was trying to pull a fast one. I never made a big deal out of it, just let the customer know it was policy to confiscate, I'd file a report and give them a receipt letting them know I was sending it to the authorities. They could take it up with them at that point.
It's incredible to me that as of the previous version of the $100 bill, that anyone would take the fake bills.
I worked at a bank for about 2 years and the quality of fake $100's I came across was NEVER any good to fool the bank, however, local businesses did not scrutinize it beyond the counterfeit marker (which is rarely indicative of the legitimacy of a bill).
Edit: I should note that every single fake, or suspected fake, would be sent out to the secret service. In the case where several bills would show up in a short period from local businesses, local police would be contacted as well (and of course demand to see the bills, which they never did).
I don't know if it's that simple -- if I print out fake dollar bills it'll probably be treated differently if I sell them as movie props than if I sell them as counterfeit money you could pass off as real.
A perfect replica of a dollar bill, made with the exact materials and equipment as the real thing, is still a counterfeit. Being a counterfeit isn't a physical property of the object, it's about provenance.
Well, yeah, but that'd be recirculating counterfeit currency. Also you might not realize that the bills were fake, and find out later in a store or something.
This is a correct understanding, though the US bills have gotten harder to counterfeit in recent years with the addition of color shifting inks and 3-D security ribbons. I'm comfortable taking larger bills for craigslist stuff when I have a mini UV light and anti-counterfeit marker with me. Though I prefer to meet at the bank and immediately deposit in the ATM.
Generally counterfeiters will strip the ink from a $1 bill and print a $20 or $50 on it. This way it feels like real money. It is easily detectable if you hold it up to the light, but a cashier might not notice it right away.
What do you mean? You would need to track every bill and simultaneously find two matching ones, and now you know one of them is a counterfeit but which one?
I've read of someone who worked at a bank who was told that after getting a counterfeit, looked them up in the phone book, and they dealt with it promptly.
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