If you’ve been to a Chase ATM in Manhattan recently (or any ATM in the city, for good measure), you might want to check your wallet for fake bills. They should be easy to spot because they’ll be blank on one side and made out of regular paper. The terrible fakes found in two Chase ATMs on Monday were never supposed to fool anybody, The New York Times reports, but they were meant to trick the machines into thinking they’d been fully stocked with cash, not shorted $110,000.
Police think an employee of NCR Corporation, which stocks the machines, pocketed his delivery and substituted the fake stuff. A technician “said that the bills were cut correctly, but that visually it was easy to tell they were different.” ATMs are designed to kick any funny bills into a reject bin, and that function worked for most of the fake bills found Monday, but at least two made their way into customers’ hands (the bank knows this because the customers turned them in immediately). That’s not a bad average when dealing with thousands of counterfeit bills, but it’s also not great, considering the counterfeiter didn’t even bother to color in both sides.
