The Counterfeit $20.00 Bill Story

1993

A True Story

Written in 1999* 454 Words*

By Howard Yasgar

In January 1990, I was at my local supermarket in Miami, and I had just paid my grocery bill with a $100.00 dollar bill.

I received my change as usual, and I tucked it into my wallet.

A few days later I decided to organize my wallet, and that’s when I noticed something strange, one of the $20.00 bills I had received was a lot lighter color of green than the others.

I couldn’t believe it, I had never seen a $20.00 bill with such a weird color before.

I took it out of my wallet and really looked it over closely.

Sure enough, some of the printing on the bill was pretty good but several other things just didn’t look right to me, so I compared it to another $20.00 bill

There were several other problems, but still the biggest problem was the color, it was obviously a counterfeit bill, anyone could see that, and here I readily accepted it with my change.

I had an Auto parts business in Miami, so getting counterfeit money was nothing new to me, but usually it wasn’t me personally catching the bogus money, it was always the bank, and the worst part was they kept any counterfeit money they found.

I always asked the bank for the counterfeit money back, I would have liked to look at it myself and then show it to my friends.

The bank said if they gave the phony money back to me, I might try and pass the bills to someone else and then the Secret Service would have to arrest me for passing counterfeit money.

I knew they were right.

So when I received this fake $20.00 bill, from the grocery store, I was so excited to actually have a real counterfeit bill, that I made sure that always carried it in my wallet, and showed it to everyone.

I always used it as a conversation piece everywhere I went.

One day I was staying at the Sheraton hotel in Detroit Michigan, and I was waiting for a friend to come pick me up for supper.

I had a bit of time to kill before he came, so I told him, that I would be waiting for him in the down stairs bar where I would be having a drink.

My friend showed up on time and I left with him to go for supper.

Once we were at the restaurant, I mentioned to him about my counterfeit $20.00 bill that I had in my wallet…

Yes, you guessed it, it wasn’t in my wallet.

It was dark at that bar at the Sheraton, and I must have accidentally used the Counterfeit $20.00 to pay for my drink.