Retailers get tips to spot counterfeits

The busy holiday shopping season is prime time for counterfeiters to strike. A fake $20 bill or a counterfeit credit card is more likely to slip by a harried clerk, scam artists reason, and way too often they’re correct.

In hopes of reducing holiday losses accrued due to bogus bills and counterfeit credit cards, officials from the Albany County District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Secret Service joined to offer a counterfeit detection training program for local retailers Monday at Colonie Center.

“Counterfeit currency is a trend that is on the increase,” said Christopher Baynes, an assistant district attorney. “It’s very dangerous because there is no recourse. If a bad check is exchanged in a store, the bank may make that good for you. With counterfeit money, whoever is stuck at the end of the musical chairs, so to speak, you’re stuck with that money. You take that loss.”

Over the past year, counterfeiters have been using a much more organized approach, Baynes said.

“We’re seeing groups, often based in New York City, and they take the Thruway up. They stop in Newburgh, they stop in Kingston, they stop in Poughkeepsie, and then they come to Albany, where we have a huge number of retail outlets.”

Often, counterfeiters target large retailers, where customers and clerks typically have less interaction, and large purchases are more likely to go unquestioned.

“The best way to launder money for a counterfeiter is to buy a gift card,” Baynes noted. “Once they have the gift card, they can spend that $100, $200 gift card on whatever they would like to spend it on.”

Adam Giles, lead loss prevention coordinator for Hannaford’s District Eight, which covers most of the state of Vermont, attended the training. He said illegal credit card use has increased consistently over the past two to three years in the Hannaford stores he oversees.

“I see a lot of the credit cards, where people will steal a credit card, come into our stores and purchase the AMEX or Visa gift cards, which you can use anywhere, and then ditch the card. They’ll buy four or five $100 ones,” he said.

Bogus credit cards are harder to detect, the Secret Service agent said. Legitimate numbers are stolen by computer hackers and applied to otherwise legitimate-looking credit cards. Occasionally, the valid numbers are applied to plain pieces of plastic, but unless the customer hands the card to the cashier, this isn’t immediately obvious.

Cash is being more consistently counterfeited as technology improves, Baynes noted.

“It becomes easier for the counterfeiter to make the money because you can buy a very high-quality laser printer for not a lot of money,” he said. “In our experience in terms of numbers, compared to three years ago, it’s probably up fivefold.”

Another factor spurring that increase is the poor economy.

Lately, the District Attorney’s Office has seen what Baynes called “a demographic shift” from violent and drug crimes to counterfeiting.

“You look at their criminal records and you see that they used to be dealing drugs and now they’ve shifted over to white collar [crimes] because it’s safer on a physical level for them, criminal penalties might be less, and they’re less likely to get caught,” he said.

During the past year, the most commonly counterfeited bills have been 20s, followed by 50s, he said.

Counterfeit 20s and 10s are what most often come to the teller windows at First New York Federal Credit Union, said Gloria Friello, a security officer for First New York who attended the counterfeit detection training. Counterfeiting crimes have been on the increase over the years at the bank, she said, and the holidays are when the majority of incidents occur.

Unfortunately, catching perpetrators is not an easy task. Tellers often catch the counterfeit bills, “but not necessarily the person who’s involved because you could be an innocent person who receives a counterfeit bill,” she said.

Baynes said the best way to combat counterfeiting is for tellers and cashiers — those dealing with customers — to be diligent about inspecting cash.

“Feel the money,” he suggested. “Counterfeit money in most cases does not feel like normal currency. It’s made out of usually resume paper or thick stock paper.”

Sometimes that technique won’t reveal a fake bill, however, noted the Albany-based Secret Service agent who conducted the counterfeit detection training program. Sometimes $1 or $5 bills are bleached and then reprinted as $100 bills, he said. The way to catch such a fraud is to hold the bill up to the light so the watermark can be viewed. Each denomination has its own watermark, so if a $1 bill is posing as a $100 bill, it will bear the wrong watermark.

Every counterfeit bill offers some clue to its illegitimacy, noted the agent, whose name was withheld for security purposes.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect counterfeit because the counterfeiter has to be able to differentiate between good money and the counterfeit money, so they include a small defect,” he said.

Retailers and financial institutions can register at the Secret Service’s USDollars Note Search Site: www.usdollars.usss.gov, to find out information about counterfeit money.

Categories: Business, Schenectady County