Counterfeit Money Showing Up on Ocean City Boardwalk

A sudden thunderstorm on Monday drove a crowd from the Ocean City Boardwalk into the , and a lot of money traded hands in the brief surge of shopping. Not all of it was real money.

Wes Kazmarck, Surf Mall owner and Boardwalk Merchants Association president, said other Boardwalk business owners had warned him that fake bills were going around, and one of the $10 bills collected that day "looked a little sketchy."

A closer inspection revealed a couple of the telltale signs of counterfeit money: absence of a watermark (held up to a light, a real $10 bill shows a second, faint image of Alexander Hamilton to match the main one); a difference in paper quality; and a less-glossy finish on certain parts of the bill. But at a quick glance, the counterfeit bill looks identical to a real one.

"These things are good," Kazmarck said. "That's a pretty good bill for a fake."

He said the quality of the counterfeit money is all the more scary because they're being passed in small denominations: $10 and $20 bills. He said it's more common for counterfeiters to make and merchants to scrutinize $50 or $100 bills.

"I'm hoping they just dropped these on us and got out of town," Kazmarck said.

Ocean City Police Capt. Steven Ang said Tuesday that the department has received four recent reports of counterfeit money.

Ang said merchants typically do not discover counterfeit bills until they try to make a bank deposit. Bank equipment can quickly and reliably detect fake bills, and it's the merchant who take the loss when the counterfeit bills are not accepted.

He said the suspects appear to be relying on volume of business when they try to pass their fake bills — when store clerks are too busy to take the time to study each bill.

Ang said it's not uncommon for reports of counterfeit money to increase when the Ocean City crowds swell in the summer. But like Kazmarck, Ang said it "usually involves largely denominations."

"We're seeing 10s and 20s this year, and it's decent quality," Ang said.

With the rise of technology, Ang said it's a lot easier for the average person to access sophisticated printing and copying machines. But at the same time, the U.S. is using increasingly advanced technology to add anti-counterfeiting features to all currency.

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Click on the attached PDFs to print guides on how to detect a fake bill. The Ocean City Police Department distributed one of the guides to merchants on Wednesday, June 27.

For a complete guide to detecting counterfeit bills, see the United States Secret Service's "Know Your Money" page.

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Ang said it's often very hard to track down the source of counterfeit money — as the customers who pass fake bills to merchants are not necessarily the people who produced them. Counterfeit bills could have traded hands several times before reaching any given store.

But Ang said it's important for merchants or individuals to report suspected counterfeit money quickly. He recalled a case a few years ago in which a merchant reported a person suspected of using a stolen credit card. Working with a credit card company that was reporting new transactions in real time, the Ocean City Police Department was able to arrest a suspect who was still in the middle of a Boardwalk shopping spree.

Ang asks anybody who suspects counterfeit money to call Ocean City Police immediately at 609-399-9111.