Can we get a pic of the bill? I don't THINK I've ever seen a counterfeit bill, but then again, I don't know. I'd like to see just how bad this bill is that Melissa *knows* is counterfeit.

[NOTE: I'm NOT suggesting that it isn't counterfeit. Just want to see it!]

There's not a lot of difference between taking it to your bank, or to the police/US Secret Service. Either way, you'll be out the $5, and you'll have to fill out paper work. You'll save yourself hassle if you just shred the thing.

My bank used to pay you for them. They make you fill out a form that had places you went that you might have recieved it. That was like ten years ago. Banks tend to be pricks now probably won't do it. They'd probably catch on if you did it a lot too.
I had it happen to me with a 20 dollar bill from Sears. I went running that day had a crappy velcrowalltet. My buttsweat got to it and the ink smeared. So I took my butt sweat bill to the bank and got me some real money.

When I was in china bills as low as about 3$ would be faked, but in america? Seriously! And all this "we make new designs to stop people from making counterfits" thats bullshit right there, if the govt wanted to stop that, they could stop that and money laundering at the same time. Print new money and make the stuff we have now of no value. This way people cant counterfit old bills, and money launderers that need to exchange alot of cash over time are pretty screwed or much more likely to be caught. The system we have now is worthless.

The ethical way, turn it in or destroy it. No you will not get it replaced. They only way you will be replaced, is if you had received it from a bank and you immediately noticed and reported it.

Or you commit a federal crime and try to pass it off.
I'm just sayin...

@Mike Gerow:

That's the spirit! Stopping counterfeiters is sooo personally inconvenient. Its not like the next day another bill will come along and you'll be out of $100 that time?

I had that problem many years ago. I took them (yeah them) to the Secret Service in DC. They confiscated them, told me where the bills were printed, and gave me a receipt. I sent the receipt to my home owners insurance company. You can claim it on your renters or home owners policy. They cut me a check. All I lost was time. Now personally I don't believe a counterfeiter would bother with a $5 bill. Usually its 20 and up.

@Mike Gerow: Actually it's easier for her to go to the bank. They are getting paid to fill out the paperwork that needs to be filled out. Plus they'll be able to tell if it is a known counterfeit (the Secret Service website has a database that will tell you since counterfeiters tend to make a lot of bills with the same serial number)

Don't shred it - just bring it to the bank next time you go.

@corinthos: That sounds like a policy doomed for failure - it just encourages counterfeiting!

@Mike Gerow: Yeah, I'm not sure about in the US, but in Canada whoever's got the fake bill when it's found is out the value of the bill. Naturally the police would be interested in where you recieved said bill to try and backtrack it, but no one's going to re-imburst you the money you just lost.

@Yoko Broke Up The Beatles: Odds are it looks identical to a normal $5 bill, but feels different. I remember about 10 years ago one of my friend's brother got busted for fake money, and he showed me the money and it looked identical to normal money (when you put the money side-by-side you couldn't spot a difference), but you could feel the difference. His brother was a minor though so he didn't get into any real trouble.

This is a good case for smart, financially savvy consumers to only use plastic!

@corinthos: These days, they'll probably:
1. only deal with the situation if you have an account (see #4)
2. make you fill out a long form
3. not give you anything
4. charge your account $35 for filing the form

i'll scan it and post it when i get home. the ink is running and everything.

Art project?

A friend of mine got a fake $100 bill from the cashier at a casino in Vegas. You would think they would have the DUTY to ensure they are only passing legal currency.

@Megladon: But forcefully taking bills out of circulation costs money and takes time. The system we have now works ok. It takes larger bills longer to be taken out of circulation, but eventually the oldest bills will not be used as often. When a bill isn't used much people look closer at it. There's no real benefit to telling people they have to round up every last dollar they have and trade it in by a certain date.

What they should be doing is getting rid of the pennies and dollar bills (make $1 coins). That would save the treasury money and make our (mostly cashless anyway) transactions easier too.

@Yoko Broke Up The Beatles: i got it with some ones, and i remember thinking it felt weird because it's got a bit of tape on it. later, when i was looking through my cash, even after a quick glance, it was obvious it was fake.

@Kogenta: Oh, forgot to mention. I wouldn't shred the bill, I mean on the off chance that you're mistaken and it's real, then you'd probably breaking some more laws.

Personally I'd go with taking it to the bank whenever you have some spare time, just make sure that you write down whatever details you can remember about where you got the bill from.

@corinthos: lol @ "butt sweat bill". special :-)

I use to be in retail security and probably 4 times I have had the SS come out to give talks to management/security people and point out how to recognize counterfits. They bring along samples of dud bills. I have never yet been able to pick out the dud bills from those they bring along and they tell me that those bills are just 'average' counterfits not the real good stuff from Iran. So I don't see how the average Joe or Jill Sixpack can pick out this stuff. First of all you didn't pick it out when it got passed to you so you clearly aren't any sort of expert to know if it is or is not a dud bill. Bank tellers and cashiers handle money all day so they can pick it out some of the time but probably the stuff goes through banks many times before someone picks up on it being a bad bill. Unless you just want to get stuck with a bad bill you should just pass it along in the normal course of business, if some store or clerk dosen't want to take it then just pay with other bills and the next time you shop use the one that was refused. It is just a dumb idea to take it to the Police or Bank and ask if it is a counterfit, they will absolutely take it from you and you are out the money.

[targetfiling.blogspot.com]

You *can( use a picture of a spider as legal tender.

I recently needed to withdraw $6000 from Bank of America. I wanted large bills, and having heard of a Wachovia bank that had passed counterfeit $100 bills to a customer, I decided to prepare for my bank visit. I went to Office Depot, and purchased a $4 counterfeit testing pen. At the bank, as the teller was counting out the bills 10 at a time, I would ask him to pause and run my pen across all of the bills. It added a whole minute to the process, and gave me reasonable assurance the bills were not counterfeit; it was worth the $4 and the time.

Once you walk away from the teller, you can't prove that they gave you the bills, so you need to take the initiative and test them before accepting them.

Always spend it. Otherwise you lose the money. As long as you don't post about it on the consumerist, no one will know you willingly passed the bill.

Drop it in the collection plate.

/george carlin'd

@NotChoinski:

Oh get off of your high horse, NotChoinski. The OP is already out five bucks, now she's morally obligated to spend her time at a bank filling out paperwork and being questioned by some government stooges?

@GuinevereRucker: That picture of a spider I got yesterday in change was really a counterfeit. I got pretty mad at that.

@Blinky987: I was wondering how long it would take for this comment to come up.

@Yoko Broke Up The Beatles: It's amazing how easy it is to fake bills, they're usually crinkled up and if you don't look closely, it's easy to mistake them for the real thing. I ran across a fake 10 once when i was a cashier in college- I was about to give it back to someone and it's a different feel.

@Hate_Brian_Club: Actually, yes, she is, because if people don't, then this kind of thing will just continue. I'm not going to tell her she's a bad person if she doesn't, but she SHOULD, yes.

so what happens if you accidentally use one of these to pay for something? do they throw you and jail and say "that'll teach you to not closely examine all of your money!"

Some time back, a younger hotel desk clerk refused to accept a bill from me, claiming it didn't look right.

I took it back and later looked at it .... it was just an older Silver Certificate bill that, while rare, was still out in circulation.

@Corporate_guy: If I was to be honest, I'd probably do this if it were $10 or more, because I'm broke, and can't afford ot just "lose" $10 some weeks. That's two weeks of gas!

@Megladon: "Print new money and make the stuff we have now of no value. "

Canada does half of this - we have constantly upgrading money and when the old bills are deposited to the bank, I assume they're taken out of circulation. They are, however, still viable money; except the old 100 and 50 dollar bills - a lot of places won't accept them.

Our bills are supposedly the hardest to counterfeit in the world - we have braille, holograms, watermarks, fractured numbers that line up when held up to the light, black light reactive dots and micro-printing.

And then there are the coins which go up to $2 and often have themes to make them collectable (but they're common currency none the less) including Olympic sports, centennials for provinces and territories and other occasions.

I can only think the people at our mint must get bored VERY easily with all of the constantly changing money.

My only peeve is they changed the alloy in the pennies - for decades they were high in copper and other non-magnetic metals, but now they're magnetically reactive.
I miss being able to sort out the pennies with a magnet :(

@Hate_Brian_Club: Yes, I believe that's what he's saying, pretty clearly too. I'd assume he's saying that because it's true.

I mean, on the other side of the scale, if I watched someone get hit by a car, and instead of reporting the plate number I caught, I just decided it wasn't worth my time, it's be similar. Where you draw your line isn't where he (or I or most people) draws their line.

@reflection717: The dollar coin will NEVER EVER succeed unless they stop making $1 bills. We should have learned that by now. Sacajawea $1 coins or Susan B. Anthonys, anyone???

@MustyBuckets:

Oh yes, that's exactly the same.

Yes, she should probably report it. No it is not remotely the same as watching someone get hit by a car and not reporting it.

I have to admit I'm guilty of not examining my money. I glance at a bill just long enough to see the denomination and that's it. I can't recall ever looking at a bill long enough to tell if it's real or not. Maybe I should start.

I wouldn't have thought they'd bother with counterfeiting $5s. When I worked retail (back in the Dark Ages) they trained us on counterfeit bills, and basically said not to bother checking anything lower than a $20, that while you'd occasionally see a counterfeit $10 it just wasn't cost-effective to do anything less than a $20. Must be getting cheaper.

I've also wondered if all the changes in the US's paper money might be encouraging or aiding counterfeiters; between that and the prevalence of using plastic, I never know what my money's going to look like anymore, except the $20s (ATM familiarity). I probably wouldn't recognize a counterfeit $5 bill unless it had a picture of GWB or BHO or Britney Spears...

@Felix the Cat:
Advocating illegal passing of bills and linking to your own blog at the same time. Classy!

@usa_gatekeeper: And valuable too. Get some sleeves and put the bills in them.

@aguacarbonica:

It is called an example. Both are crimes and should both be reported. If you can remember where you got it, it helps. They may also check for fingerprints on the bill. and find something there.

@ribblefizz: That's exactly the reason why they make fakes of the low bills now, no one bothers to check them. On the other hand, everyone checks the high denom bills with UV lights and the works these days.

That's one of the reasons that Canada went and stuck all the security features of the $20, $50 and $100 bills onto the $5 and $10 bills after a year or two. They were finding people were making fakes of all the low value bills.

Sure, it's harder to spend them, but all the "big" counterfeiters are using gift cards and the like to move the big money.

here in canada most places dont take 100s or even 50s anymore...

3 words: church collection plate.

@Megladon: China has a 3CNY denomination?

@Chris Knight:

Too bad those pens are pretty useless in detecting all but the crudest fakes:

[en.wikipedia.org]

@lpranal:

Unless you knowingly spent the counterfeit money, you're OK, since there was no intention to commit a crime.

I received what seemed like a counterfeit $10 bill back with my change at a restaurant once, so I just asked the teller if i could have two fives instead.

Problem solved!