Bank of America Gave Me A Counterfeit $20 | Wealth Junkie
I had four bucks left in my wallet last weekend. It was time to go to the ATM..
My usual routine is to withdraw $200 in cash from the ATM that way I don’t have to go back for a while. So I went to a nearby Bank of America ATM machine and made a withdrawal. Good thing, because the next day we decided to go shopping at Costco.
Costco does not take Visa or Mastercard - its either cash, check, debit, or AMEX. I did not have our checkbook and I don’t have an American Express card, but luckily I had just gone to the ATM the night before.
I was not really focusing on the cashier when we were checking out, but I did notice that she very quickly handed something to another Costco employee and said “check thisâ€. I did not think much of it at the time, but in retrospect I now realize that what she handed off was one of the $20 bills I gave her.
Things happened too quickly for me to put it all together on the spot, as I had other thoughts running through my head at the time, but I did think it was particularly strange that it took the cashier so long to count out the $8 in change that she gave me.
We were just a few steps away from exiting the store when a Costco employee ran up to me and said, “Excuse me, sir. There’s a problem with this twenty dollar bill.â€
I worked at a 7-Eleven when I was in high school and learned how what to check for when breaking big bills. There are a number of security features in American currency to thwart counterfeits, including watermarks, microprinting and a strip running inside the bill that you can see. You can also use a special marker that will show as yellow on real bills but black on fake ones.
Even though I knew all that stuff, do you think I checked every $20 bill I got from the ATM? Of course not - I just shoved them in my wallet and drove off.
The woman at Costco was very nice. I explained to her that I had just gotten the bill from the Bank of America ATM the night before, and I still had the receipt in my wallet for the withdrawal. I went through all of the $20 bills I had left in my wallet, just to double check and make sure they were all good. There are several styles of $20 bills, and so I compared my other real bills to the counterfeit that the bank gave me.
She told me to take the counterfeit bill back to my bank as soon as I could, and just asked that I give her a real $20 bill. She gave me the counterfeit bill back, I gave her a real one, and we were on our way.
The following day, I went back to the branch of Bank of America to resolve the counterfeit bill issue. At first the woman at the bank seemed defensive and kept asking how I knew I got the bill from their ATM. But since I had $4 before I went to the ATM and took out a stack of $20 bills there is no possible way I could have gotten the bill from somewhere else.
It turns out that their branch of Bank of America did not maintain the ATM machines. Instead, they outsourced the job to another company. So the problem was that the other company slipped up and did not check all of the $20 bills before refilling the cash in the ATM.
All in all the lady at the bank was nice. She said that she had never seen an instance where the ATM machine was the one with the counterfeit bill. I told her that this was not about the money and I did not need for her to give me the $20 there and then. However, I did expect for the bank to take responsibility and for her to credit my account within a few days.
After a number of phone calls and about 40 minutes of my time, she figured out how to handle it paperwork-wise so her teller would not be off by $20. Then she gave me a new $20. And that was that.
I was really concerned that the bank would not take responsibility for the counterfeit money even though I got it from their ATM. It took some time to sort out, but I am glad that Bank of America owned up to this error.
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Why am i not surprised to hear this. Being in the atm business myself, I know the laws have gotten stricter with the PATRIOT ACT. But sometimes you cant get every bill! Sorry to hear that happened, and probably will continues to happen
06 May 07 at 9:59 p #