Uma Ramiah Photo
The ever-busy register at Minore’s.
A woman wielding fake ten-dollar bills tried spending them at Minore’s Meats on Whalley Avenue. Three times.
“The first time she got away with it,” said Pat Minore, the store’s owner, sitting behind a large desk in his back room office. He pulled one of the bills out of a file cabinet.
When she came back, he said, his cashier was wise to her game and refused to accept the bills.
“She even came back a third time,” Minore said, shaking his head. “So I confronted her. I told her we knew they weren’t real, and that if she came back in I’d call the FBI.”
He alerted the local police station and emailed the director of Whalley Avenue Special Services District (WASSD), the local business development organization.
It’s happened before on Whalley.
“Occasionally, these counterfeit bills come around all at once — they all of a sudden just start popping up,” Minore explained. “Someone shows up selling them, I assume.” It probably happens a couple times a year, he guessed.
It’s no surprise, but it’s a problem. “We take a hit if we accept the bills,” Minore said — there’s no compensation for businesses duped by the fakes.
“Some businesses only discover that the bills are counterfeit when they deposit them at the bank,” said Sheila Masterson of WASSD. She alerted businesses, encouraging them to get in touch with New Haven police.
“That’s our first line of attack,” she said. “We have a good relationship with the police department on Whalley.”
Sgt. Max Joyner, top cop in the area, said he’d received the email.
“I also want to give business owners a heads up that they need to call us when they get counterfeits,” he said. Joyner emailed a response to business owners after he was alerted about Minore’s, urging them to do just that. Typically, New Haven police would refer the case to an FBI task force.
“It happens, it’s not widespread, but occasionally we do get the counterfeit call,” Joyner said. There’s no real evidence of a pattern for now.
No New Thing for Convenience or Gas
H&S Manager Shah.
Jay Shah, manager at the H&S 24-hour food mart near Minore’s, has a row of police officers’ cards taped to the inside of his plastic booth window; he calls them whenever he spots a fake.
“I see them all the time,” he said, displaying three recently collected fakes. “The printing is good but the paper is usually really bad.”
He pulled out three fakes, all received over the past year.
Shah said that by now, he can pretty much feel out a fake right away. Real bills have a thicker, rougher quality “I’ve been working here long enough to know. But some of the newer guys end up taking them because they don’t know,” he said.
Shah and others, like Santosh Lamgade — who works at Best Gas — typically rely on touch to pick out the fakes. From time to time, they break out an anti-counterfeit marker. “You can get them from Staples,” Lamgade said. He used the pen on a fake $20 bill someone brought in last month.
Touch Test
But the pen isn’t a sure thing.
“The thing people need to know is that those money pens don’t really work anymore,” explained Lawrence J. Jeune Jr., assistant vice-president and manager of the START Bank branch on Whalley.
Most people don’t know what they’re supposed to be looking for, he said, demonstrating with a real bill. “If the ink comes out amber-colored, the bill passes. If it’s a dark brown or black color, you know that’s a fake.” Sometimes people have that backwards, or the difference in color is too slight to really determine the validity of the bill.
START, which opened two months ago, hasn’t seen many counterfeits, he said. It occasionally gets one in a deposit from a business or commercial client.
“So that’s a loss for the customer, which is what’s really making people angry,” he said.
To avoid taking a hit itself, START has just ordered a counterfeit detector machine.
The way people counterfeit money changes regularly, Jeune said. But one thing never changes: the feel of the paper.
“Little-known fact: the paper contains denim fibers in it,” he said. “That’s what gives it that rough texture that’s so hard to replicate.”
So Minore, Shah and Santosh had it right, Jeune agreed: the touch test is the way to go.