Counterfeit money in the United States has become such a prevalent problem that you may get counterfeit money in your change when you buy something at major retailers like Walmart.
Most big retailers don’t want to spend money or time to properly train their employees on how to spot counterfeit money. Instead, they rely on those felt-tip pens that contain ink that supposedly changes color when marked on counterfeit money.
The reason the ink changes color when marked on a counterfeit bill is that almost all counterfeit bills are made of paper.
Money isn’t made of paper, it’s made of cloth, a blend of 25% linen and 75% cotton. That’s why money feels the way it feels.
But most don’t realize that many of those pens will tell you the same thing when you mark them on a regular newspaper: It’s real! Many of those counterfeit bill markers don’t work. Very few people think of trying them and are not aware of it.
Therefore, it is quite possible that a store employee receives counterfeit money and places it in the till without realizing that it is counterfeit.
Of course, the clerk also makes change at the same till and gives the same counterfeit money to an unsuspecting customer.
You could even have fake money in your wallet right now and not even know it.
Real or fake, can you tell the difference?
Most Americans don’t have a clue.
One of the easiest ways to know is to feel it. Since real money is printed on cloth, if you feel like it’s copied on paper, it’s most likely fake.
College students are not the brightest people on Earth. They’ll buy the latest color copiers and they’ll just make copies of a $10 bill or a $20 bill and try to get them around town.
They forget that not only does it not feel like cloth, but each bill will have the exact same serial number as the original.
If someone hands you two or more bills of the same denomination, check the serial numbers. If they match, call the police right away because one or all of them are fake.
There are methods counterfeiters will use to avoid the problem of it feeling like paper and serial numbers not being different.
One of the most common methods is to take four $10 bills or four $20 bills and cut a corner off each one and glue those corners onto a dollar bill.
Suddenly these $1 bills become fake $10 bills or fake $20 bills that not only feel like real bills but also have different serial numbers. They will also pass the counterfeit pen test.
They then use these counterfeit bills to purchase items for just a dollar or two, and the clerk returns real money as change (assuming the clerk didn’t unknowingly take counterfeit bills, of course).
Unaware that they just put a doctored note in the box, they subsequently give it to an unsuspecting customer as change. It could be you.
It’s easy to pass around doctored notes like this because people don’t look at the note itself. They just look at the number in the corner. If it has a 10 in the corner, it must be a $10 bill, right?
If they were to actually look at the note, they would find that it is doctored because the wrong president is in it.
Everyone knows that Washington is on the $1 bill. It’s not on the $10 bill or the $20 bill.
Do you know which president is on the $2 bill? In the $5?
Who is on the $10 bill? Who is on the $20 bill? The $50 bill? The $100 bill?
Not knowing can cost you.
Memorizing which president should be on which bill is one way to help you spot a counterfeit bill and avoid being scammed out of your hard-earned money.
It is not a crime to be in possession of a counterfeit bill unless you are trying to defraud someone by giving it to them to buy something. If you do, you could receive 15 years in prison and a $15,000 fine. (USC Title 18, Section 472)
(Answers: Thomas Jefferson is $2, Abraham Lincoln is $5, Alexander Hamilton is $10, Andrew Jackson is $20, Hiram Grant is $50 (Grant’s first name is not Ulysses, as is commonly thought.) and Benjamin Franklin is on the $100 bill).
