ferrousland.com - diary archives
Friday, September 15, 2000
counterfeit - 06:35 AM
in my extreme state of hunger last night .. 
.. i forgot to mention in my diary here something pretty exciting & unusual that happened yesterday at work. we found a counterfeit twenty dollar bill! really! i've never seen one before (at least not one that i could pick as a fake) so i was quite fascinated by it. our notes have sort of a clear plastic window included as a part of the design with a pattern on it, lots of colours, & of course, a watermark that can be seen when it's held up to the light.
this note looked pretty good at a glance, but on closer inspection there were a few things that weren't right about it. the clear plastic window had no design on it, it was totally clear. the colour was not quite right & the images were a little fuzzy & the places where it was supposed to be completely white had speckles of colour in them. there was no watermark of course & the big thing was that this note could be torn. our notes are made of plastic so (although they do tear in a pretty bad way sometimes) if you try to tear one from the edge you are usually unsuccessful. if you see one that has torn, it's very thin & the tear is very clean (sort of like the tear on a plastic packet such as chips are stored in) but this one tore just like paper. it felt & looked right at first but once you knew it was fake you could tell that it was also a little thicker than the real ones.
my boss took it to the bank to see what to do about it & they said that they can send it to the reserve bank, where they'll estimate it's value & then reimburse you to that amount, but that seems really silly. it's not legal tender, it's worth nothing! apparently the police can't do much about it since there'd be no fingerprints left (or else far too many) to catch anyone so he just stuck it on the register to show the other staff & make them aware that it's fake so they can keep an eye out for more. apparently there's quite a few of them around & not just twenty dollar bills.
so if you're in australia reading this, keep a sharp look out because these notes are worth nothing. if someone tries to give you one of them, refuse it or you'll end up with a worthless piece of paper in your wallet.
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