Amanda Vaughn
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, November 14, 2007
YELLOWKNIFE - After a busy day of regular customers, one of the counter employees at the Cash Store on 50th Street noticed that two of the $50 bills in her till were a little different than the rest.
"When I looked at them closely next to the other bills, I could tell right away," said Jenna Conrad, the manager of the franchise store.
Jenna Conrad, manager of the Cash Store location in Yellowknife, holds up photocopies of the counterfeit $50 bills her store received two weeks ago. - Amanda Vaughan/NNSL photo |
The employee who had taken the bills brought them to Conrad's attention at the end of the day, and though they stood out in comparison, she said the bills looked real enough that even she might have taken them.
"I told (the employee) that I might not have noticed either, without seeing them next to real bills," she said, describing the fakes as being a different size.
The Cash Store is a chain of storefront financiers, specializing in payday loans and cheque cashing. Conrad said the chain does not provide counterfeit bill recognition training for its staff.
"I have talked to my employees now," Conrad said, adding she had warned other businesses in the area about the bills.
Const. Troy MacLean, RCMP G division's resident counterfeit expert, said retailers aren't the only people who should be paying attention to the legitimacy of their hard currency.
"Counterfeit is like the hot potato," MacLean said, "whoever gets caught with it is out that money."
He also said knowingly passing on a counterfeit bill is illegal no matter how you got it. Law-abiding citizens who come into the possession of cash they suspect is "funny money" should resist the urge to unload it at the nearest shop.
"It carries a penalty of up to 14 years imprisonment," MacLean said, adding that the penalties for using fake money are stiff to protect the country's and the world's confidence in Canada's currency.
"(Counterfeit) is an attack on our country's financial system," he said.
While there are occasionally opportunistic producers of lower quality counterfeit bills in the North via inkjet printers or other means, he said that more of the counterfeit currency that turns up in Yellowknife is produced by more sophisticated operations down south and finds its way into the territory via the normal lines of commerce.
"We have a pipeline (of business) straight up from Alberta," he said.
He also said incidents of counterfeit tend to spike in the summer when the numbers of people coming into town are higher, and around Christmas, when spending in general is higher.
MacLean said that with newest bills, the Bank of Canada has aimed to make the security features easy to spot, making it less difficult to verify that a bill is genuine.
"It can be perceived as rude to scrutinize someone's bill," MacLean said, mentioning one of the reasons for the simplified security features.
He said there are now four easy-to-spot marks that retailers and consumers alike should make it a habit to check for: the holographic stripe on the front left of the bill, the watermark of the bill's portrait on the right, another watermark bearing the digits of the bill's denomination on the right, and a woven thread on the right which should form a solid line when held to the light.
To learn how to spot these marks, the Bank of Canada provides detailed pdf diagrams on their website, and provides individuals or businesses with specialized literature packages upon request free of charge.
For those requiring a more personal demo, the RCMP are available right here in Yellowknife.
"A business can call us and I will come down and do a hands-on presentation for their employees," MacLean said.
