I remember as far back as 2010 trying to photocopy £20 notes at work & the printer coming up with big error messages.
Separately there was an instagram page as recent as a couple of years ago that was selling fake notes. They shut it down. They passed the pen test in shops, never tried to bank them though.
A few years ago, I had a guy give me two $100 bills, and he seemed to be in a bit of a hurry (I recall that he was a bit of a stocky and well built guy in his 40s and even appeared to be a kind of thug.. like he might pull a gun on me or even want to beat me up if I turned my back on him), and when I looked at the two $100 bills, I could NOT read the small vertical numbers, and I cannot recall if I had tried to identify a watermark.
My inability to read the small vertical numbers was enough for me to assert that I was not accepting those two bills. He then insisted that I use a pen to verify their authenticity, and I told him that I could give less than two shits about a pen test (I said it nicer than that), and he continued to insist, so I did the pen test on them, and they passed. He continued to insist that i accept the bills as payment and I said no fucking way (nicer than that)...
It took a few minutes before that thug appearing guy stopped trying to get me to take those two bills, and I should have called the police on that fucktwat, just because he was so damned persistent with trying to get me to take obvious fake bills... and he seemed to think that he could persuade me to take those two bills because they passed the pen test...
Seems to me that some people just have "bully" or "thug" built right into their way of interacting with other people, and gotta feel sorry for some small retail businesses that might get stuck with people like that inside their business, and there might not be personnel to get rid of them. That was the vibe that I got from that dude.
I remember as far back as 2010 trying to photocopy £20 notes at work & the printer coming up with big error messages.
Separately there was an instagram page as recent as a couple of years ago that was selling fake notes. They shit it down.
A geezer I knew worked in a scrap yard and they'd only pay him in forged £20 notes.
They were fucking awful and you could tell instantly yet he still managed to get rid of almost all of them. Every shop assistant he offloaded them on would twitch the moment they touched them but they stuck them in the till anyway.
Maybe I met some variation of that guy? A brother from another mother, perhaps?