"In One We Trust?" Counterfeit One Dollar
Bill Outbreak - CoverUps.com

By Fredericka Kozlowski
CoverUps.com Investigator

With all the focus first on the 100 dollar bill and then the fifty, twenty and ten, criminals are running out of bills to copy. It seems absurd, but rumors of counterfeit one dollar bills circulating the market are causing panic in businesses and consumers all over the country.

"No one expects the one dollar bill." Store owner Joshua Mullins claims that his bank was first to deny a significant amount of ones. He then started randomly testing ones with a standard anti-counterfeit pen and was shocked.

"Afterjust one week, I received about ten percent phony bills." Mullins then started checking suspicious transactions, those that were all in ones.

This photo taken just last year is already out of date thanks to the new Alexander Hamilton. It's rainbow decor matching its big brothers has forced counterfeiters to smaller bills.

"They were easy to pick out, mostly it was purchases between five and twelve dollars. They could have easily give me a five, three ones, and two cents from the penny jar, but they used nine ones. Even the people in line behind them could sense something wasn't quite right." He has also seen a decrease in convenient debit card and credit use, as well as an increase in George Washingtons.

"It's not that significant, but it's enough to raise eyebrows, and awareness for other cashiers across the country." Mullins has had ten arrests in the past month.

The Los Angeles Police Department, who made these arrests as well as several others, says that this is a serious threat. "The time and effort to stop this epidemic would be astronomical. There is just no way cashiers can check every single, well, single," says Police Chief Bryson Cunnningham. "It's all about having the sense about which transactions to check, which can defiantly lead to consumer discrimination lawsuits. It's a big ugly mess every way you look at it."

Some fakes are easy to spot just by looking at them, Allegedly a mistake was made in one of the mass productions, where "annuit" was misspelled as "amuit."

And it gets worse. Some suspect the fifty cent piece and even the quarter to be next.

"Think about it, it's so easy to make, impossible to test and the least expected," says crime expert Terri Kennedy. "It's all about the criminal's determination. It comes down to their will and patience. Do they want to rip people off big and fast, or slow and steady?"

One thing is clear; counterfeiting sees no end in sight and a window of opportunities.