I wonder to which degree this is true? Do private businesses really have a right and/or duty to confiscate money they think is counterfeit?
Relatedly, a local restaurant has a couple of counterfeit bills tacked to the wall. And the counterfeits are not very good - the paper and reproduction quality are terrible, but they did go to some surprising efforts to superficially reproduce a few security features, such as the security strip and the watermark. I don’t recall exactly, but I think they just outright printed the watermark on the back so you could see it when you held the bill up to light. It was obvious but only if you turned the bill over. And people tend to do counterfeit checks on bills from the front for some reason. I guess because the treasury puts all the key security features on the front which may be kind of silly.
I dunno…when he told me it was fake I asked for it back and he said he was required to confiscate it. I didn’t necessarily want to keep it but was just curious to inspect it again closer. It was obviously deliberately distressed paper and partially ripped and I remember thinking it was on it’s last legs in circulation. Must have been a relatively high quality fake in terms of the graphics because I was certainly fooled having it in my wallet for a couple of weeks.
That freakin’ Big Mac ended up costing me almost $30!
I think getting it from a trusted source really makes a difference. I read about someone who pulled out a bunch of cash from their bank before going on safari only to discover that it was counterfeit once they were out of the country, and had no recourse against their bank for giving them a crap load of counterfeit currency.
Last time I was in Bank of America I noticed that the tellers now all have automated cash counters, which I assume also have some basic anti-counterfeit detection. Hopefully those result in more accurate transactions with customers.
I’ve read that CDS does not rely on the constellation.
Either way I have read about photocopy machine repair technicians who have to make service calls when anti-counterfeitting measures are triggered and shut machines down with an error code, leaving the last scan in memory as evidence.
Your friend could easily have gotten caught and fired at the very least, let alone prosecuted for counterfeiting.
I’m surprised they didn’t mention CGI as a current method. Does the Secret Service also raise objections to there being a digital file of the $100 bill?
TV/Movies also have the same issue when any scene that involves poker chips, be it a home game or a casino. The chips are invariably shoddy looking.
“All negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration [of US currency] that contain an image of the illustration [of US currency] or any part thereof shall be destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use in accordance with this section.”
