As if further testifying to the state of detachment I have developed toward just about everything, I was recently amazed at how even a subject so near and dear to peoples' hearts as money (to paraphrase Bob Farina) could fail to evoke anything stronger in me than laughter when I was recently passed counterfeit currency in a moderately large sum.
A few weeks back I sold my G4 tower for $500 on craigslist. Obviously, cash is pretty much the only thing you want to deal with in a transaction like that. So I got a stack of 50s and 100s from the buyer and left them on my desk, gradually using them up for groceries and daily expenses. Saved me several trips to the ATM. I'd made my way down to the last hundred and I scooped it into my wallet last Sunday as I headed off to an internet cafe on Vermont.
The internet cafe experience is a new thing for me, now that I have sold the tower and traded it in for a laptop with wi-fi. Besides "war-walking" (my other habit for picking up free wi-fi access), on cold wet days (such kind as we are frequently getting more of with the arrival of winter) when I have excess time to kill and nothing to do, I will stop in at a cafe for a cup of tea and surf like a true Los Feliz techno-bohemian. ( By the way... support small businesses that offer free wi-fi and piss on Starbucks and other large chains who could easily afford to provide it, but partner up with other mega-giants like Verizon to charge you for it instead. )
Anyway, I was wondering where I should break this hundred. I considered using it at the coffee shop, but the girl behind the counter was young and cute and my chamomile tea was only about $2. I didn't want to risk making her unhappy by emptying out her change drawer, or giving her the idea that I was trying to impress by flashing big money. I decided to break it somewhere else.
Later that night I went to Albertson's up the street and bought about $20 worth of groceries. It seemed like a good time to get some change.
The check-out guy was a man in his 50s. I gave him the bill and he made a two-handed "snap" with his fingers at the edges of the bill: a habit people seem to develop when they handle money all day long. And guess what? The fucking bill split almost clean in half !
He made an "uh-oh" sound and walked away with the bill. He took it over to a little UV light stand set up by the manager's area and flipped the bill this way and that for several minutes, seeming to wait for something to appear. Then he came back over shaking his head and said, "Nope, can't take it," and handed the two pieces back to me.
"Wonderful," I said.
"Take it to the bank and see if they can give you a replacement."
"That doesn't seem very likely," I thought aloud.
"Well, then take it to a liquor store. We've been getting a lot of bad 50s and 100s lately."
I paid with a credit card, picked up my groceries and began walking back home, thinking over the situation.
I should've spent it at that cafe. That girl in her young 20's never would've snapped the bill, it never would have broken and she never would have put it under a UV scanner.
But someone there might have gotten in trouble when it was found out the bill was no good. But what were the odds of that? I didn;t know the bill was bad. It looked pretty damn convincing. Just how many of those bills I got from that guy were counterfeit anyway? I'd been spending them all month. I wonder if he knew his bills were counterfeit. Maybe he didn't. Maybe this was the only one.
Should I try to tape it together and use it somewhere else? Just get rid of it!
But inevitably, someone is going to discover, just as the Alberton's guy had, that the thing was a fake. And then someone will be out a hundred dollars.
I could give it to a homeless person I thought. If it worked for them, great. But there's the same problem. They take it somewhere and it gets found out. (What shopowner will accept a torn hundred from a homeless person without checking it out?) Or, the shopowner takes it and they have to eat a hundred dollar loss later. Or someone else further down the line does. It always comes down to that. Someone will have to eat a hundred dollars worth of shit.
Well, fuck it. It might as well be me, I thought. There've been times in my life when I've needed a hundred dollars a whole lot worse than I do now.
So then. What to do with it? There was always the chance that a bank or government agency MIGHT give me a legit bill in exchange for it. I decided to check the website of the US Treasury.
In fact, the Treasury website has some interesting pages devoted to the subject of counterfeiting. Apparently, the Secret Service was established in 1865 to combat counterfeiting, which had been in practice since the British used counterfeiting to devalue the currency of the "Continental" during the American Revolution. Counterfeiting continued through the Civil War, when over 1600 state chartered banks printed their own unique currencies, "making it difficult to detect counterfeit bills from the 7,000 varieties of real bills. " [- from SecretService.gov)
The Secret Service did not officially begin protecting the life of the President until 1902, although they began informally watching over President Grover Cleveland on a "part-time" basis in 1894. I'm not sure what that "part-time" thing was all about, but once McKinley was assassinated in 1901, it was gradually eased on to their roster of duties, even extending to the President-elect in 1908.
In this era, President Theodore Roosevelt transferred 8 Secret Service agents to the Justice Dept. This was the beginning of the modern FBI. Over the next 40-50 years, the Secret Service's criminal jurisdiction expanded to the investigation of espionage and the protection of former Presidents and family members (spouses until death or re-marriage, children until age 16).
Further attacks and assassination attempts extended the protections of the Secret Service to Presidential and VP candidates and foreign diplomats and dignitaries. The office was continually subdivided and renamed and their jurisdiction was redefined, although it was usually directed along the lines of protecting the lives of people in public office or investigating fraud. Today however, the Secret Service has been folded into the Dept of Homeland Security, so they are now also the executors of the Patriot Act.
All of this, in addition to the following:
Please Note: There is no financial remuneration for the return of the counterfeit bill, but you will have pride in doing the "right thing" to help combat counterfeiting.
... ultimately led me to question the wisdom of inviting the Secret Service over for tea. I began to think that whatever I chose to do about the situation, it was essentially costing me $100. Although it might be cool to meet a real live Secret Service agent, if only so I could write about the experience, it might actually NOT be cool. For instance, the paranoid part of me reasons, what if contacting them casts suspicion on me? I prefer not to be noticed by any agent in charge of administering the Patriot Act. Anyway, I've learned some interesting trivia about US currency and the Secret Service that I would not have looked into otherwise.
And it only cost me $100 !
I pass the savings along to you.
What to do if you suspect a counterfeit
Fun Money Facts! From the Bureau of Engraving and Printing
Know Your Money - Interesting Facts from the Secret Service website
A History of the Secret Service, as told by the Secret Service
