Real classy: Ripping off a Girl Scout selling cookies
According to stories on the Globe & Mail’s and Denver Post’s websites this morning, a twelve-year old Girl Scout selling cookies in Colorado was scammed by a couple who gave her a counterfeit $100 bill when they bought a couple of boxes of cookies. They got the cookies and $93.50 in change and the Girl Scout troop found their whole day’s profits wiped out.
The police have the counterfeit bill now so hopefully they catch the idiots. A good Samaritan heard about this and donated $100 to the troop, so the sting of the financial loss is lessened.
I hope they choke on their ill-gotten cookies.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
One of the tactics of counterfeiting is to launder your fake cash by tendering a large counterfeit note to buy somethign small, so you can pocket the change.
93.5 cents on the dollar is a good haul.
This is one of the things that really pisses me off about people that won’t accept $50 and $100 notes. It makes sense not to take a big note if I’m buying a pack of gum – as a minimum it’s both suspicious AND even if it is legit, it cleans out the till. $50 notes aren’t really that big any more so not taking those is just plain ornery. However, if I am buying $96 worth of stuff and tender a $100, I EXPECT that they will take it. A scumbag isn’t going to be buying that much with his fake note.
Worse, of course, is that the greatest number of counterfeit notes in Canada are $5 and $10, in the US it’s $10 and $20.
When I worked in a gas station many years ago, we weren’t allowed to keep more than $200 in the till at any one time. Because a lot of people were using $20 bills, it was easy to find yourself with a whole lot of $20 bills and not much else other than coins. This was particularly frustrating when people would buy a small amount of gas or just a bottle of oil or washer fluid, pay with a $20 and comment that they were using a $20 because they would get a lot of change, rather than the $10 or $5 bill I could see in their wallet as they extracted the $20.
And that’s the hallmark of the counterfeit money launderer.