I wanted to make sure all of our friends knew this
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published on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 11:06 PM MDT
By JODI HAUSEN Chronicle Staff Writer
Employees at Wal-Mart in Bozeman were unable to provide descriptions to police of a man and woman who used a counterfeit $20 bill to pay for a $1 drink at the North Seventh Avenue store Monday.
The couple attempted to pass a second counterfeit bill at the store but when a manager began to inspect the bill, the two fled, according to a press statement from the Bozeman Police Department released Tuesday.
Bozeman police have received five reports of counterfeit money being used in the city since July. Most have been $10 bills, the statement said.
The Billings office of the U.S. Secret Service has reported an unusually high number of $100 counterfeit bills in circulation in Montana, according to a press release from the northwestern office of the Better Business Bureau.
The Bozeman Police Department’s release stated that $100 phony bills have been passed in both Missoula and Great Falls within the last week but it has not been determined if the two cases are related. In Missoula, the bills being passed were smaller in size, had purple coloring on the back and lacked the strip or watermark normally on currency.
Authorities encourage people to call if they receive questionable currency. The Bozeman Police Department can be reached at 582-2000 and the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office at 582-2100.
For more information on identifying counterfeit currency, go to: http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/money_detect.shtml.
The Montana Chamber of Commerce has also posted an image of the purported counterfeit bill on its Web site: http://www.montanachamber.com/uploads/docs/Website%20pdfs/CFT%205%20bolo.pdf.