More counterfeit bills turn up in New Phila
NEW PHILADELPHIA (WJER) (Jan. 31, 2023) – Police Chief Mike Goodwin is urging business owners to be on the lookout for the counterfeit bills that have been popping up across the city.
He says they’re typically easy to spot if you have a counterfeit detection pen or know what to look for.
“They seem to be fairly decent quality although if you take a little bit of time and you know the feel of the money, you can definitely tell the difference. Real money has a texture different than just a regular piece of paper, which most of these are printed off of some type of a scanner or copier that’s able to produce the colors.”
The warning comes as officers try to figure out where the fake hundreds that turned up at three city businesses Monday came from and if there’s a connection with the ones from a couple of weeks ago.
“Unfortunately, by the time the businesses realize, the person passing this bill or document is long gone. We may have some video of them on the time and then we try our best to track them down.”
Goodwin says they usually end up handing these types of cases over to the feds to investigate.
“We may not be seeing the larger picture that somebody is passing thousands of dollars of these same bills with the same serial numbers in different jurisdictions, so we try to pass these off to the federal authorities because they certainly have the resources and know what’s going on in other places.”
The department has a photo on its Facebook page of the man who used fake bills for purchases at two businesses on the same day in mid-January. Goodwin says it’s too early to say if the same person was responsible for the ones that showed up Monday.