That was my inclination - larger denominations to follow once the receiver proved they could move those singles.
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I’d pay $5 for one those fake $1 bills as souvenirs. At that rate entire batch should be worth $4.5 million.
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I was gobsmacked at the ones instead of twenties thing too, but then I remembered that I’d read about China having a plan to destoy our economy by making all our money untrustworthy via counterfitting. This could then be a first installment? Still amazingly ill-advised. I’m enjoying it.
It was to differentiate that stack from the other boxes full of 50s and 100s that the feds didn’t see right next to the boxes of 1s.
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Doesn’t any one here work with printing vendors? It’s obvious the job order ticket said: Denomination = $100. But the shop read it as: Denomination = $1.00. Sloppy handwriting and now the shop has to figure out how to recoup some of the loss when the customer rejected the job.
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I joke with cashiers penning my $20s that my perfect counterfeiting scheme would be dollar bills (“You could be a hundredaire!”), so I might be on the Treasury Department’s small potato watch list now. 
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Around 2001/2002, I got a couple $1 bills that looked fine but felt funny (they felt like they had been laminated with wax), but I dismissed it because who counterfeits a $1?
When a couple cops came into the store later I showed them the bills & asked them. They said they felt weird but they were probably okay because who counterfeits a $1?
So now we know who.
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A retiree did it in the 1930s, and he never got caught passing them even though he had “Wahsington” on the notes. They even made a movie about him (“Mister 880” starring Burt Lancaster as a hapless Treasury agent).
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What does a stripper give you in return that has monetary value when you tip them a 1 ? or do you mean the strip club takes the customers larger notes and gives them them the 1s to tip the strippers ? which also doesn’t make sense as it would lead back to them so quickly. Am I missing something here ? I’m just asking out of professional interest doing helicopters every night is to much work to do for fake 1s.
the choice to only show the end of the bills with the hashmarks instead of the end with the big pink chinese characters might lead one to think that this is less of a foiled sinister plot than the customs pr department would like it to appear
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From a practical standpoint, $1 bills are much easier to counterfeit, since they lack the special anti-counterfeiting measures that are included in higher denominations.
I’d guess the origin was not China, but North Korea via China.
I carry the $50 in my wallet. I found it on the street and didn’t know what it was, but it looked cool.
Besides the Chinese characters, it feels completely fake.
Wowzer! Good catch also, @AlsoDiana. Seems like mystery was solved before press-release.
Awww. There goes the fun. I see the corner mark in the first photo now. Well, it’s nice to know the answer at least.
But it’s confusing how this became a big deal, unless it’s the fact that they were being brought into the US instead of into China where one would expect them to be used for training cashiers.
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And while they were inspecting the fake $1 bills, the case of fake Benjamins snuck past in the distraction…
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I’m pretty sure that the amount of one dollar bills that people use is not enough to destabilize the economy this way.
Hahhahaa. I am glad I revisited this thread. You people solved the mystery. So - not counterfeit money at all.
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US authorities seize $4.5 million in counterfeit $1 bills
The big pink Chinese characters just makes it look like real US currency stamped with Chinese characters. It does not indicate they are fake (except perhaps if you read Chinese?)
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