The Counterfeit $20.00 Story

                                            The Counterfeit $20.00 Story

                                                                         2018

                                                                  A true story

                                                               Re-written 2019

                                                                 Howard Yasgar

In January 1990, I paid my grocery bill with a $100.00 dollar bill.

I received my change as usual, and 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 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 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.

The biggest problem  was the color, it was obviously a counterfeit bill.

I had a Auto parts business in Miami , so Getting counterfeit  money was nothing new to me, but usually I didn’t catch the counterfeit money, but the bank did, and they kept any counterfeit they found.

Sometimes when I made a deposit, the bank would inform me that there was a few fake $100.00 bills mixed in with the deposit. Then the bank  always confiscated them, so I never had the opportunity to look at them closely.

Once when the bank confiscated $300.00, it was a lot of money, so I asked them for the bills back, but they said by law they had to confiscate them. They said if I got them back, I would probably try and cash them somewhere and they were right about that, I would have.

They said that if I did try and pass them,  I would be arrested for passing counterfeit money.

So when I had the fake $20.00 I was excited to actually have a real counterfeit bill. I carried it in my wallet and I always showed it to everyone, it became quite a conversation piece for me.

When I showed it to someone it was easy to tell it was counterfeit because of the weird green color, you could spot it as a fake as soon as you saw it.

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

I had time to kill so I told him, that I would be in the downstairs bar 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.

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

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