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> The first was in college. I remember my friend coming home from his first year in college and telling me about how he passed a counterfeit $30 he'd found to a clueless clerk and they actually made the correct change. My wise-ass response was that that wasn't actually counterfeit, it was just fraud.
The fraud of passing off something of lesser value as the genuine article is the definition of counterfeiting.
If you want to know more, there is a much better and very entertainingly written series of articles about this, from a 1949 issue of the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/08/27/old-eight-eigh...
That article had an unsatisfactory and anti-climatic ending. It ended right when the Secret Service arrested the counterfeiter, where a normal reader would expect more discussion of how the Secret Service found the man and how they questioned the man after the arrest.
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So you're the person that called the cops on that guy at Best Buy?
I don't know which story you are talking about. I was working at a frozen yogurt place.
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The state reserves some of the harshest punishments for counterfeiters, since large scale counterfeit operations is one of the few crimes that is an attack on the state itself. The US secret service was originally created specifically to combat counterfeit money, it's no surprise that they would keep tracking this man for a decade. This man is unusual because he did the tiniest amount of one the most severely punishe…
I have two "counterfeiting" stories - both of which are humorous even though one involve the Secret Service. The first was in college. A buddy of mine scribbled a facsimile of a $20 onto a piece of paper with a green marker. He then handed it to the checkout clerk at the cafeteria who took it and started to hand them back change. He stopped her and said "no, no it's a joke - look at what I just handed you". She was e…
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If $1 is $19 I am suprised more people didnt check that their $1 notes are legit back then. Story makes it sound like $1 was chump change.
Do you check the $20 bills the ATM spits out, or just stuff them in your wallet and spend them?
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I have two "counterfeiting" stories - both of which are humorous even though one involve the Secret Service. The first was in college. A buddy of mine scribbled a facsimile of a $20 onto a piece of paper with a green marker. He then handed it to the checkout clerk at the cafeteria who took it and started to hand them back change. He stopped her and said "no, no it's a joke - look at what I just handed you". She was e…
The best are sheets of $2 bills with perforations, as Steve Wozniak did: https://youtu.be/LJ1TIYxm1vM
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Very interesting. It's probably because fewer people take the time to counterfeit $50s, $10s or $2s than anything else. What about $100 bills? In Argentina, if you have an older $100 bill, no one will take it. And apparently there's a roaring trade in fake $20s in Costa Rica, which I only learned at a casino there recently when I took USD directly out of an ATM and had it inspected by a pit boss in the same establish…
In Tanzania specifically, the $100s were fine. The weird pricing seemed driven partly by perception. It was usually street vendors who would say $1 bills were worth 2000 shillings (~84 cents), while the larger banknotes were fine. Other vendors would charge X shillings or Y dollars, and when you did the calculation, it would be about 70 cents per dollar. I had crisp $1 bills and asked them why they discounted $1 bill…
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That article had an unsatisfactory and anti-climatic ending. It ended right when the Secret Service arrested the counterfeiter, where a normal reader would expect more discussion of how the Secret Service found the man and how they questioned the man after the arrest.
Did you read all three parts? They laid the groundwork by alerting local police and store owners about the counterfeiter probably living in that area of Manhattan and got lucky because the neighbor's apartment caught fire and the building owner threw out some of his burned possessions, including the plates and some counterfeit bills.
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Do they? I certainly don't - it's just a wad of notes. I'd probably notice if the one on top didn't have a "20" on it, and that's about it. When I spend it I'm also just looking to see if it has a "20" on it.
I hate speding dollars. All the bill sizes being g the same, and the colors similar. Too easy to make mistakes. I feel for the blind...how do they cope?