A counterfeiter amongst us?
Warning: Probably nothing new to you since this is what I often do but this is a bit of a rant. Once again I find myself aggravated with our ignorance as a so-called advanced species. Recently there have been rumors of counterfeit money being circulated in the city that I live in. Nothing new there I suppose but the thing that I now find funny is the fact that a real counterfeit bill “I know that is sort of a oxy moron but anyway” a real counterfeit bill would cost upwards of twenty dollars to print, being that the ink is multi-colored, there are watermarks, a metal strip, the paper is not a normal every day stock made from wood but rather is a cloth fiber and that is not even to mention that I don’t know where the heck you think you could get plates or a press to print “real counterfeit bills”.
I know twenty dollars per bill is a bit steep but I am considering the fact that the person whom printed these bills is someone I knew from school and I know would not be able to afford it to cost any less than that since they would have had to of bought a very considerable amount of these materials to bring the cost per bill down and this well, just is not plausible.
With that said comes the real funny part. There are counterfeit one-dollar bills being passed around. I find this extremely amusing because I see one of these so called counterfeit bills, for sure they are counterfeit in that they are not real but seriously if someone is so stupid to have accepted one of these incredibly obvious fakes well then they deserve to be out the money they were worth.
Some dumb twit used a damn color printer and scanner to make these. They are extremely obvious, they do not feel remotely close to a real bill, they do not look like real bills and it goes without saying they are very obviously not real bills, they have a yellowish color to the print hinting that the bill is a result of a scanned bill, the inks should be blues and greens mixed with red, not green with a yellow hue. I am not sure if the person who printed these bills should be on America’s dumbest criminals or if the people who have accepted them should be on a new show called America’s dumbest victims. Luckily for this store I was in, they were given this bill to post as apposed to accepting it.
The thing that brings this all up and spawned this post is that this convenience store I had been in. The clerk ran a counterfeit check pen across the 4 one-dollar bills I had paid with. I could do nothing more than laugh even though my amusement was not directed at her. The thing that got me was that this is just one more thing to cut into the bottom dollar of a business in more than one way. First you must buy these special markers and it will be allot since they are using them for every single bill. These markers cost around $3.50 a piece. Add that to your daily expenses or weekly dependant on your volume of sales. The next thing is now the incredible waste of time it is causing. Imagine a line with 15 people in it who just want to pay and get home but oh wait… Now you have to wait for each and every bill to be checked and I have just tried to pay for $85 in gas along with another $15 for a quick bite to eat and a drink. I sure do hope you are not the last person in that line. This is a serious joke. Train your employees. Not kidding, if it looks like a dog, smells like a dog and barks like a dog chances are pretty darned good that it is in fact a what?
Another thing that I must mention before going is that these so called counterfeit detector pens are nothing special. They use iodine to react with the starch used in paper made from wood, which then turns from brown to black to hint that it is counterfeit. These so called counterfeit detector pens would not hold up at all against a “real counterfeit bill” since a real counterfeiter would use a higher priced paper made from what? Surely not wood! I guess you can just be happy to know that the price to make a real counterfeit is just not economical. Now I wonder if you realize that the $1277.50 a year you are blowing on those stupid pens is also not very economical but teaching an employee what to look for… Priceless!
I do want to be clear though that I am not suggesting that we dumb down the checking for these bills but what I am suggesting is that we look at the cost and for what? If a counterfeit bill is passed at your store it is going to be passed with other bills that are legit in hopes that it would be overlooked. If it is such a good counterfeit that even a partially trained eye can’t tell then we end up with it in our deposit. The chance of us getting a frequent supply of these fakes is zero to none. We will find out it is counterfeit when the bank checks our deposits. The total we lose out would be what, a few dollars. Weigh that against the aforementioned yearly cost, or heck even one month’s cost. Was it worth it or is it worth it to simply train your employees. Now this does nothing to stop the bills from passing hands but there is much to be done there as well that does not involve you spending more money or wasting precious time. You know when the bill was passed within a maximum of what 12 or maybe even 16 hours. You have surveillance tapes. You turn in the appropriate tapes to the police and then you go about your normal business. A few cops watch the tape(s). Weed out the ones who pass credit/checks as well as those who don’t pass a bill of the amount the fakes were and out of the 200 customers you have 20 suspects. Process of elimination is what this is called right? It works so use it!
The person who printed these bills is in prison now and I don’t envision parole any time soon. I do know this can happen any time and anywhere so as I mentioned before train your employees to spot fakes. If you can’t feel or see that it’s fake then your little pen just is not going to do the trick anyway.
I will now give a list of things I look for when accepting money. Bills $20 and higher will have a metal band in the left side, have obvious layers of colors with individual lines forming patterns in them that you can actually feel as raised edges on the surface. Newer bills stick together annoyingly due to these raised edges. Older bills are not as detectable with this method in which is equally helpful. If a bill is crumpled, folded many times and so on yet still has stiffness it is an obvious fake. Take a piece of printer paper and run an alignment test on it with a laser printer. Cut the paper in four. Take that printed pieces of paper and fold and crunch them for a bit randomly. Unfold and straighten them using a table to flatten them out even. Hand them to your employees and have them feel the paper and how stiff it still is. This is due to the starch used to make the paper. Cloth fibers are just not like this.
Another thing you will want to do is to take some of the printed test paper and a few authentic new and old bills and put them together. Rub them over each other. Feel the difference? The concept here is that I assume that you still count the money and therefore must actually touch it so I implore you to encourage your employees to use just two of their senses being site and touch while counting and add a little actual thought to the process. These are all things we should be doing anyway and the government has given us all these nice little tweaks to our currency for just this purpose so why then are we not using them? I would still suggest using your pens on higher valued bills but checking every single bill regardless of its value is seriously flawed. Why not just have a dispenser that requires a credit card only and be done with it if you can’t get a decent employee. I’ll build you such a machine for as little as 33 x my est. 1-year cost for those pens. You pay a single employee that within 1 to 2 years. Ponder on those thoughts… Comment on it if you want. Maybe give us a few tips back that you would use to spot a facsimile/fake.