A unidentified man asked a clerk at a Giant Eagle store in Pittsburgh to make change on a $1 million dollar bill featuring Grover Cleveland’s portrait. When the cashier refused and confiscated the fake money, the man attacked an electronic funds transfer machine and then reached for her price scanning gun.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
When the manager refused — telling the man the store had a policy of not returning counterfeit money — the man became enraged and grabbed an electronic funds transfer machine and slammed it against the counter, McNeilly said.The man then reached for the cashier’s scanner gun, and the manager called police, McNeilly said.
The man was not carrying identification and refused to give his name to police. He was being held yesterday in the Allegheny County Jail as John Doe.
McNeilly said police hope to identify him through fingerprints.
The largest bill in circulation is the $100, but there once once a $1,000 bill that featured Grover Cleveland. Police say the fake bill may have been part of a pamphlet distributed by a Dallas-based church.
Cashier in Pittsburgh has million reasons to doubt[Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
(Photo:Wikipedia)
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I remember reading a news story about a guy who was arrested after paying for groceries with two dollar bills. The story was that the clerk didn’t know that the $2 bill was legal, so he called police. The guy buying the groceries had just gotten a whole stack of $2 bills from the bank (he gave them away to kids at Christmas so he just got a big stack of them). Of course, the police arrived and noting that the serial numbers were sequential, arrested the man for counterfeiting money. It took the U.S. Secret Service to determine that in fact, the money was legitimate. I would be PISSED.
[www.moneyfactory.gov]
Cool stuff from the fed. When my mother worked at a bank, they had a guy who would give his wife 5 – $1000 bills for xmas. Picture trying to cash those at Taco Bell. Or worse, Best Buy, where they call the police for $2 bills.
@RvLeshrac:
Silver certificates & gold US notes have never been illegal to hold. It’s just that the Treasury won’t redeem them for either precious metal anymore.
href=”#c2605960″>Jeff_McAwesome:
The $100,000 bills were only for transfers for between Federal Reserve Banks.
There have also been $500,000,000 Treasury bonds printed & issued.
I have no idea who bought them, but even the canceled ones would be collector’s items.@
wasnt there a $500.00 bill?
Someone gave me one of these bills when I worked at Target — definitely related to a church. She handed it to me and said, “Keep the change.” I’m not sure why she felt that a random retail clerk needed saving, or why she thought fake money with President Cleveland’s mug would do the trick. But, I did keep it. For the laffs.
@tedyc03: I think that story has to be some kind of urban legend. I’ve heard the EXACT story, only it involved Best Buy and a pissed off customer paying with $2 bills out of spite. The man was arrested because the ink wasn’t quite dry and the bills had sequential serial numbers. Of course the man was released when the Secret Service examined the $2 bills, informed Best Buy that $2 are legal bills. And that the ones the customer used were not counterfeit. In fact for a denom like the $2 that’s not circulated alot, if you can get your bank to give you ANY of them, they’re often fresh out of the BPE (Bureau of Printing and Engraving) presses. Fresh bills often don’t have completely dry ink and if you get them from the bank fresh from the BPE they also have sequential serials.
@Namilia:
Ummm…neither way is correct. One does not use apostrophes for plural nouns — they are used for possessive nouns. No apostrophe was necessary at all in your sentence.
I tried to use a $2 bill to pay for a slurpee once at a 7-11 when I was a child. The man yelled at me (in his delightful Indian accent) that next time I should bring real money and proceeded to give my money back and tell me to take my slurpee for free. All the more reason to keep paying with $2 bills!
So if the largest bill is a $1000 bill… then the man wasnt trying to pass “counterfeit” money, since what he handed them was not a reproduction of any actual bill in circulation. Wouldnt that kind of be like trying to pay with monopoly money or one of those novelty bills? It doesnt matter I guess, but I was just thinking that if it isnt actually a counterfeit bill, the store has no right to confiscate it…
meh.
$2 bills are great for low-rent strip clubs. Not the nice ones, but you know the kind. Not…that…I’d know anything about that at all, just saying…
@JohnMc:
Not quite. The Treasury and banks have almost never had any need to shuffle around paper currency – a slip of paper is worth just as much to the “right” person, even LESS to the “wrong” person, and serves the same purpose where a large-sum transfer is concerned.
The largest notes ever issued were the $100,000 Gold Certificate and the $10,000 Federal Reserve Note.
@MrEvil:
Crap. You don’t get “freshly printed” notes, ever. They’re also not sequentially packed. The reason sequential serial numbers are a dead giveaway is because you *don’t* get sequential bills except when whole sheets of currency are ordered as collector’s items – and collectors don’t cut up the full sheets. Usually. It isn’t impossible, but highly unlikely.