i hate when customers at work hand me a 100 dollar bill and then scoff when i check the watermark. like, lady, i will break out the counterfeit pen. i’ll draw your god damn portrait over benjamin franklin’s before i make a ruling. i’ll get a second opinion from a coworker on the opposite side of the store. i’ll call the mint like, “heyy…it’s daniel…you guys print any hundreds lately? i got a lady here with a hundred, just making sure it’s one of yours…haha cool just checking. so how are the wife and kids?” the people that make a fuss are always like, obviously rich too and you know that’s why they have a problem. like the nerve of me to doubt a rich person’s money. how dare i lump them in with a normal person with a hundred dollar bill. eventually one of them is going to let it slip. i’ll take the bill from them and go to hold it up to the light or feel it between my fingers or something and they’ll laugh and go, “oh, no, no no no i’m wealthy.”
i had a co-worker catch a counterfeiter. back then we all had “truth teller” pens. and the rule was “anything over a ten gets checked if you’re not comfortable with it” but not everyone did it. but this girl was hard core about her pen. especially if she got a bad feeling from a customer. girlfriend had TWO truth teller pens in case one gave a false positive.
this couple come through her line with a lot of stuff and they acting like they are in a hurry. this was the wrong thing to say to this girl. you say that to her and she goes slower cause it freaks her out.
she finally gets to the end and the guy hands her a bunch of 20′s. first she straightened them out and counted them, and then she took her pen out. when i used it i made a little flower so that i would know that i did it. she made a swirly. the first swirly came back black, the second swirly came back black. she got out the SECOND truth teller pen and scribbled a like down the center of the bills…. black as coal.
she was freaking out. dude look like he was intense. she very politely asked if he had another form of payment as she would not be able to accept his money. “WHY NOT?!”
*gulp*
“cause it’s not real, sir.”
“MONEY IS FUCKING REAL! YOU BETTER GET MANAGEMENT OVER HERE! MY MONEY IS AS GOOD AS ANYONE ELSE!!”
she very quickly walked over to the phone and paged, and her voice, was so tinged with panic that everyone, even CUSTOMERS stopped dead in their tracks and listened to the page.
you’d never seen a page answered so quickly. it was prolly ringing before she put the phone back on the receiver. “what’s wrong? what’s going on? are you in danger? are you okay?”
and she told them that no, she wasn’t okay,, her customer was screaming and cursing at her and his money wasn’t real and she had no idea what to do now, this wasn’t covered in the CBL’s!
this got manangement on their feet. “stay call, take a deep breath, we’ll be there in 5 seconds with back up. it’s going to be okay. just breathe.”
which is easier said than done with a man that weighs 150 lbs more than you is screaming his ever loving head off. even the retiree door greeter came over and stood by her just as a show of solidarity, she couldn’t really have done anything, but she was a witness, and sometimes that’s enough to get people to back down.
it must have felt like a hour later, but it was about 2-3 minutes before the store managers came walking down the aisle with the popo trailing behind them. the cops were soooooo happy to see him.
one member of management took over the register as the other led the cashier off to sit and collect herself, while the cops talked to the guy and eventually arrested both the guy and the girl. (apparently they’d been looking for them)
management was so fucking happy that she caught him because he had like 300 dollars in funny money and she caught him dead to rights. they calmed her down, thanked her profusely, gave her the rest of the day off with pay, and called her bf or mother or someone to get her home, because she was shaking like a leaf and they didn’t want to her to get hurt on her way home.
So yes, i will use my pen when i have too. i’ll hold them fuckers up to the light to make sure that the right pressie is in the corner pocket.
don’t fuck with the money honey it just don’t pay.
When I was a manager for a large craft store chain, I had a customer pay with a $100 bill. One of those new ones, the blue ones that look more like they belong in a game of Monopoly than in your wallet, and there was something… Off… About it.
The watermark of Ben Franklin on the bill looked like the shittiest line art of a man you’d ever seen. It was horrendous. But it passed my marker test, so I had to give the guy his change and with a smug grin and $50 worth of Copic markers, he left.
I thought about it all night and into the next day, when the local weed dealer came in to buy his baggies. See, jewelry baggies are cheaper than ziplocks despite being the same fucking thing, and I was the only one who would treat the guy like a normal fuckin dude, so as we were chatting as I rang him out, I sighed and said, “I got a counterfeit hundo the other day.” And I told him about what I’d gone through. I told him what the guy looked like, what he bought, how he acted in line. And when I was handing him his receipt, I said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, man, but just watch out for any suspect looking Benjamins over the next few weeks.” I gave him one of the counterfeit markers and told him that they wouldn’t do any good, but he could have one anyway.
I guess I just wanted to tell someone about it, because I stopped thinking about it after that.
Until the day I got a call from the pot dealer about a month later. He was furious. Someone had ripped him off in over $250 of weed, and they’d done it with–yup–fake Benjamins. He gave me the guy’s name, his description, everything. And then, at the very end, he added, “I’m luring him downtown for a drug deal. Call the fucking cops.”
So I did.
The cops swooped in and grabbed the guy, and not only did they find my Copic markers that he’d bought from the store, he found similar high ticket items from other stores in the area. The cops came back, returned me my markers, and asked how I knew to tip them off.
I told them it was a lucky guess.
And that’s how a drug dealer and a junior store manager bagged a counterfeiter.
I need this last story to be a hit television series.
