Mall Warns Stores About Counterfeit Bills

On Valentine’s Day, the Northwest Arkansas Mall got an unwanted gift.

That day, someone passed four counterfeit $100 bills in the mall. Two of the bills came through Camelot Music, which is owned by TransWorld Entertainment of Albany, N.Y. The other two were in the mall’s deposit that night.

All four counterfeit bills were discovered by Vicky Williams, senior teller at Superior Federal Bank’s mall branch.

Williams said she noticed the bills because they felt different that the new $100 bills she was counting in a stack.

“The grit of the paper was different,” she said. “It felt like construction paper.”

Williams said the bills were the new design, which is specifically meant to thwart counterfeiters, who have more access to higher technology printing equipment than ever before. She said the bills looked identical to the real thing, except one of them was “smudged” and another one had a pink spot on the back of the bill. The bills were apparently washed to make them appear weathered, she said.

Had store employees been a little more careful, though, they would have spotted the bills as counterfeit. The fake bills didn’t have two details that can only be seen when holding the newly designed bills up to light: a watermark of Benjamin Franklin’s face and a tiny line made up of the words “100 USA.”

“Out of the four, two of them had the same serial number,” Williams said. “All four hundreds came from the same place.”

The mall’s security office sent notices to all of the stores there to warn them of the counterfeit bills. The notices spell out all differences between the fakes and the real bills.

Gabe Mallard, manager of Camelot Music, has taken his detection system one step further. Mallard bought a set of Dri Mark Counterfeit Money Detector Pens, which can be purchased at office supply stores in the area.

When U.S. currency is marked with the pen, the ink looks yellow, which fades a few hours later. When a counterfeit bill is marked with the pen, the ink looks black. A three-pack of the pens sells for $7 at Office Depot in Fayetteville.

Williams said this isn’t the only recent case of counterfeit bills being passed at the mall. In early February, nine fake $20 bills were found by the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis after they had been deposited by the Northwest Arkansas Mall.