Received a counterfeit 100 today at the bank.....be aware.....

[goose3]

I cashed a coin check last week and as is my norm, I place the proceeds into my bank box until I find something cool to buy.

 

The teller was counting out the 100's and finished and I pointed one out to her that caught my eye. She took it and looked closely at it and even used the "pen" on it which showed it to be real. I placed it in my stack and put in my box.

 

Went in today with another check to do the same and thought while I had the box open that I'd exchange that 100 for another since I didn't like the look of it. Took the 100 out to her at her counter and told her that something was definitely not right with it and that I would like another. She gave me another and then she and I and another teller and the 2 managers inspected the one very closely and I also called my fellow worker that is currently working on a counterfeit case involving 100's and he came too and inspected.

 

The 100 was bogus. She wrote on it again with the "pen" and her marking looked yellowish and not dark brown or black which means counterfeit. Within a minute or 2, or probably as it dried, the ink disappeared.

 

The Strip that reads USA 100 upon closer examination was not within the bill but rather applied to the reverse side of the bill which gave the appearance of genuine when quickly held up to the light and inspected. The strip appeared to almost be something like correction tape for a typewriter.

 

The seal on the front right was also very thick and all of the green lettering including "100" was a shade or 2 darker. The reverse was also just a shade off but on the light side.

 

One pretty much fail safe way to determine whether or not your 100 is real is to look in the lighter areas for blue and or red colored fibers.....the almost look like little hairs.

 

On a side note, there are also bills in our area (11 in the past week or 2 in our SMALL town) that do check out as genuine WIth the "pen" and are very deceiving....but again....look for the "hairs". Most of these are series 1996 also.

 

I have no qualms in saying that my note would have gotten past 999 people out of 1000, if not everyone.

 

[TomB]

Nice work, Detective!

 

Are you able to share an image or serial number?

[goose3]

that would have been cool to take a photo. I wasn't working, just cashing a check.

 

and my camera is at Oly getting repaired.

[TomG]

Not sure where you are located, but according to the news some counterfeit 100's have turned up in MD. Apparently someone took a five and bleached the paper and then printed a 100 on the paper. Make sure you check the watermarks on your money.

[Hoot]

Great story Goose! Good detective work! Any rewards, like $99 on $100?

 

Hoot

[BankNote1]

I hate to hear the bank employees are only useing a pen to tell if a note is fake or not!!! The crooks have been bleaching low denominations and printing $100's for quite some time now. Did anyone think to look at the watermark?

[cybersharque-migration]

Funny thing about them counterfeit bills: tellers today are so very stoooooopid.

 

Every time I go to the bank to "buy money" (as my little one puts it) the bills come out in all four geometric orientations at random. Sad. The Treasury goes thru hoops to make the portraits nice and big and distinctive and the insufficiently_thoughtful_person tellers don't know how to handle money.

 

In the old days, you would hold the bills NOT so that the long axis would be perpendicular to your chest, but to that the short axis would be perpendicular so that you could look squarely at the portrait. Then you fan the bills forward, one at a time, making sure that all four fingers caress the back of the bill. While all the time focussing on the portrait. And you NEVER count money from hand to hand. No siree, the bills are in the right hand; the right thumb advances the top bill, the left hand takes the bill only so long as to put it on the counter. Hand to counter, not hand to hand. Unless, of course, you're in the business of accepting counterfeits and passing them back to customers.

 

Now the variety of designs in circulation makes it harder to focus on the portraits, but my solution is to sort the bills by design when I receive them and then count them correctly. Of course the tellers think I'm crazy...until I hold up a counterfeit and tell them to call the manager over. One time, the manager suggested I had substituted the bill, at which point I told him he'd better preserve the videotapes, 'cuz I'm calling the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and I am sure the boys downtown will take great interest in a National Bank that is (a) passing counterfeits and (b) accusing the customer of being the passer. At which point the bank accepted the loss, but they did not ask me to fill out the paperwork required by law, so I went ahead and called the OCC. Next time I went into the bank, don'ch know, there was a new manager.

 

The truth is, however, that of all the counterfeits I found in my telling days (5 years and about two dozen bills caught...not counting the kited bills 'cuz they're not counterfeit) only once did I detect the bill by looking (really muddy offset fiver). Instead, every bill (other than the really bad $5) I have ever picked up (and I have never been accused of missing one even though I pushed millions of bucks to the Federal Reserve Money Room) I picked up with my fingers. Counterfeits don't feel right...usually, they are slippery. Even when (1974, it was) the bad guys hijacked a load of real bond paper, the bills felt wrong because they did not print their bills using intaglio. The current high-res counterfeits are hard to tell by looking, but they still don't feel right.

 

Anyone that relies on pens or on the security strip to find counterfeits is an amateur. But of course bank tellers today are amateurs, which is why there are so blessed many counterfeits in circulation.

[IGWT]

Wow. Hi & welcome, Cybersharque.

[EZ_E]

Great post!!! Thanks for sharing your experiences. Way to go on spanking that bank manager, too!