FAKE MONEY RECEIVED at Bank in Tennessee

counterfeit fake money bills given out at bank in Tennessee

A man says he received fake money from the place you’d least expect: the bank.

He says he deposited a check at a Regions Bank in Bellevue, Tennessee, only to get a counterfeit bill back. The couple showed us the bill in question and, while fake, it looks perfectly real.

Julie Yarnall says her husband physically went into the bank.

“It was a $100 check and he asked for cash back,” Yarnall said. “He got five 20’s and one of them was fake.”

But, like most of us, he didn’t know. That is until he went to Goodwill to buy something with that money.

Yarnall says an employee did the marker test and that’s when they realized this bill isn’t real. You can imagine the couple’s confusion, wondering how it’s possible to get fake money from the last place you’d imagine.

Yarnall says they then tried their best to spot the differences.

“We got together, found a bill from the same year, found a light and looked at it, wondered how we could know it was fake if we didn’t have the magic highlighter marker,” she said.

They came to realize that there was no way they could.

“Even right next to a real one it looks real,” Yarnall said.

A Regions spokesperson says associates are well-versed in detecting counterfeits based on information from the secret service. When money comes into a bank, it goes through cash-counters equipped with counterfeit identification software, which she says Regions banks have, but those aren’t always fool proof.

So, while rare, these instances aren’t impossible. The U.S. Treasury Department estimates that about one in every 10,000 currency notes in circulation is counterfeit.

The Regions spokesperson says you should call the bank if you believe you received counterfeit money from one. The president of a different bank gave another possible explanation.

He says, usually, when you deposit money to a bank, that money goes through the counterfeit counting machine. However – especially on a busy day or if it is a very small deposit – not every single received bill may go into the counting machine, so another way a bank could end up with fake money is if it simply got past a teller as they were taking a deposit.

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