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TORONTO – As more and more counterfeit $ 100 bills are peddled to dealers, many refuse to accept them at all, or only do so reluctantly, they say.
“I ate three in one week, and that’s when I said, ‘We’re done,'” says Douglas Wheeler, owner of a Toronto bakery. “That was six or eight months ago.”
Wheeler no longer allows its retail stores to accept $ 100 bills. He sees fake bills when he counts cash, he says, but a hurried cashier often lets one pass.
“I count all the money in all my bakeries. I understand when I count money, but girls are usually busy, they have a ladder and maybe the lighting isn’t that good. They don’t seem to notice, which is why we stopped doing it. “
Numbers published by the Bank of Canada, which tracks counterfeit banknotes, show that the number of counterfeit $ 100 banknotes has increased more than tenfold in just four years, from 2015 to 2018.
In 2018, over 11,000 hundreds of fakes were detected across Canada.
The problem comes close to the scale of the problem with counterfeit $ 50 bills in the early years of the century, when many retailers refused to accept them, or bought machines to detect forgeries, after they were burned.
However, due to the higher value of the $ 100 counterfeit bills, retailers lose more.
If someone buys a cheap item with a fake banknote, they get real money in return. When the fake is detected, they are long gone.
“Over the past two years we have had an influx of counterfeit products into this industry,” says Deanne Deschamps of the Common Good Beer Company of Scarborough. “We have had many counterfeits and many other companies have complained about this.”
The brewery reluctantly accepts only $ 100 bills, he says.
“Our beer prices start at $ 2.95 per can. What would happen is that every now and then people try to break a high volume counterfeit banknote. Of course we end up losing, because someone in our retail store accepted them, provided the change, and we lost money. “
A Tim Hortons outlet in East Toronto will only accept a $ 100 bill if there is no alternative and if it has been first inspected by a manager. However, team leader Yidan Eden says, some escape young and inexperienced cashiers.
“Many times they are children, they still go to school, they don’t pay attention and they don’t really know it.”
“Many Tim Hortons don’t accept $ 100 bills.”
The Bank of Canada has no immediate plans to redesign the $ 100 bills, spokesman Alex Paterson wrote in an email.
“Higher-value banknotes are traditionally more of a target for counterfeiters, even if counterfeiting rates remain low,” he wrote. “So when the time comes to issue one of those higher-value notes later in the cycle, we will be able to take advantage of even more advanced security features under development, which offer a greater step forward in security.”
However, another thing the Bank of Canada takes into consideration when replacing money is how quickly it wears out. New polymer banknotes last at least 3.5 longer than old paper ones and lower value banknotes wear out faster than higher value ones, being more frequently exchanged.
Wheeler says the fake $ 100 bills he saw were real $ 5 bills that had the design of a $ 100 bill photocopied on them. Copying the brown of a $ 100 to the blue of a $ 5 makes a fake more convincing than copying the red of a $ 50 to $ 5, an effect he describes as “much more”.
Counterfeiting, he points out, is not a victimless crime.
“The bank takes it out of our deposit,” he says. “Most banks nowadays have machines that they put all the cash into and the machine spits it out. I’ll never get it back – they have to confiscate it. “
How can retail employees recognize real (or fake) $ 100 bills? The Bank of Canada website shows six characteristics of the invoices to look for.
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