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On the Boing Boing Boing podcast, I mentioned that I had been passed a phony $1 bill, but now I'm not so sure. Here's why.
Last Sunday, I bought my kids some ice cream ($7 plus tax for two small cups!) and gave the girl at the counter a $10. She handed me two $1 bills and some coins. One of bills was normal looking. The other one was as white as a sheet of photocopy paper, and just as thin. It was very wrinkled and the edges were frayed. It felt extremely flimsy.
When we sat down, I showed the bill to my 9-year-old daughter and I told her that I thought it was counterfeit. She wanted me to go back and exchange it for a real dollar, but I told her that a counterfeit $1 bill is worth more than a dollar to me.
At home, I looked at the bill under a microscope. The printing looked fuzzy, but the paper contained telltale red and blue fibers, the kind found in real currency. I don't think a counterfeiter specializing in $1 bills would use this kind of paper. Also, when I held a magnet close to the bill, it clung to the magnet (as explained here).
My conclusion: the money is real. I think it went through the laundry, though.
Reader comment:
Adam says:
The story of your possibly counterfeit $1 bill (and your recent mention that you lived in Japan) reminded me of the time I found a 10,000 yen note in the gutter on my way to work on a rainy morning. I'm almost certain that the plenty of salary men and office ladies saw it but because it was so dirty they were not interested in it. Not me. When I got to my office I asked what I should do with it. The majority felt I should take it to the police station and that it would be given to me if nobody claimed it.
To my surprise my supervisor said I should just keep it. She had once found some money on a train and turned it in. Six months later she came home from a two week vacation to discover that during that time a postcard with directions to pick up the money had arrived. Unfortunately the date by which she had to pick up the money had already lapsed.
With the decision to keep it made, I took the note home where I laundered and ironed it. Needless to say the color was washed out. Additionally, the bill was no longer square and had two permanent creases – presumably the result of having been run over by cars a number of times. The most anonymous way I could think to spend the note was to buy the cheapest one way ticket at the train station. At first the ticket agent tried to ask a lot of questions but I said I didn't speak Japanese and could he please speak English. I imagine that ultimately he decided that whatever trouble might arise from this note was probably less trouble than trying to deal with a gaijin.
As for counterfeit money, after I returned from Japan (1993) I ended up working on a prototype electronic notebook for some microscopists. They had a contract to try to determine the origin of some extremely good counterfeit $100 bills. If, on a scale of 1 – 10, a bill only has to be a 5 to be easily passed these bills were a 9. As I recall, there were two theories. One was that some other country planned to flood the market with these super counterfeits. The other was that it was the work of a hobbiest hence the extreme attention to detail. In either case, the goal of the microscopists was to look for particulate matter either in the paper or trapped between the paper and the ink with the hope that the particulate matter would reveal where in the world the bills were made. I believe it was these bills that prompted many of the subsequent changes in bill design. My favorite proposed protection scheme involved the use of genetically modified cotton. While it satisfied the requirement that it would be hard to duplicate, the time required to identify a counterfeit meant that you only knew long after it was passed.
