People who work in retail or have worked in retail in the past: Does your store have a policy for dealing with $100 bills (as being potentially counterfeit)?

In the past few years here retail and others were alerted to counterfeit bills not only the larger ones. We had a good bill to compare with the counterfeit ones..which was easy as the cash register had these in there anyways.
Here a few years ago high school students photocopied money ( $20 bills) using the High Schools new photocopier/printer that copied perfectly. After passing them undetected throughout this Town and major City nearby they finally got caught! The insurance of each Business covered the losses. But the kids ( under age 17 yrs old) had a Federal agent warn them that they could had spent years in jail, and they were let off with a stern warning and probation…and possible record of that for life.( some had this record purged when they reached age of majority ( 18Yrs).
Since then, Business have a device to check bills under an ultraviolet ray device. Apparently travelling salesmen every Fall tried to scam this Town and others with phony money but it has been curtailed as Businesses are on the alert now.
Also we never took any $100 , $50, bills as it depleted our cash reserve for the day. Most use credit or debt cards now.

I don’t work in retail but my local supermarket cashiers use a pen for any bills that are $50 and up.

Not working in retail, but the till ladies at the local university cantine still use these useless iodine pens.

I don’t think most have written policy. But, it is highly recommended, especially around holiday season. Not much is 100% effective, so I think that’s why stores cannot hold employees totally responsible. If the employee ends up receiving counterfeit bills with frequency, they will likely be investigated as potentially being part of the scam…

When I worked in Bloomingdales the last few years or so we were given those pens for $50’s and $100’s. Thing is, we had counterfeit $5 and $20 bills floating around when I worked there. A friend of mine was given a fake $20 from her bank at the time! I caught a fake bill in a cash drawer of my department, it didn’t say In God We Trust. When I called security the woman said, “so?” So, needless to say the training wasn’t very good if security doesn’t know a bill should say In God We Trust. I would think any 15 year old knows that. Especially back then in the mid to 90’s. This was back when debit cards were not around. If they were available they were just starting. I don’t know exactly what year debit cards started? So, people used a lot more cash than today, and should have known (in my opinion) basic things about cash. Now, I myself handle very little cash, and it has changed a lot, so I’m less aware of the details myself. Although, the In God We Trust would still stand out as missing.

I think since my friend was given a fake from her bank, that probably my store deposited some fake bills more than once during that time, not knowing they were fake, and the bank accepted them and reissued them to other people. I know my store caught some too, and they just took it as a loss, but if they caught 10 bills there were probably 20.

As a side note, one time, when I lived in Michigan (a border state) I asked for a roll of quarters at my bank when I withdrew some money. When I opened the roll at home it had 3 Canadian coins, which were worth 70¢ on the dollar at the time. I needed the coins for my laundry machine at my apartment, and Canadian coins wouldn’t work.

When I went back to the bank to switch them out they said they couldn’t give me US quarters for Canadian quarters. When I told her the bank gave them to me in a roll it was like she didn’t believe me. The next time I got a roll from the bank I broke it open there before leaving. I usually just saved up quarters from change from buying things, so I didn’t get rolls often. Those two times might have been it. Maybe there was a third.

My only point is even the banks screw it up.

If we got a dollar bill of $20 or more, the policy was to use the pen. Because of this, cashiers were responsible for any bill accepted that ended up being counterfeit.

However, I’ve heard that even on some counterfeit bills, the pen will still show amber, so I always looked for the red and blue stitches along with the faces inside the bill. From what I’ve heard, these two features cannot easily be replicated and are a better verification.

It’s impossible to rule out a counterfeit object, of almost any kind 100%, if the counterfeiter did a good enough job….