U. officials not laughing over funny money

The cashier's office says it's recently received about $600 in fake currency, including a copy of the new $50 bill. Those bills in your wallet might not be worth as much as you think. In fact, they could be worth nothing more than, well, the paper they were illegally printed on. Officials in Penn's cashier's office have found about $600 in fake U.S. currency -- including one of the redesigned $50 bills that the Treasury Department released last year to combat counterfeiting -- over the past several weeks, according to Lynn DePorter, who heads the office. The roughly 18 counterfeit bills range from $5 bills up to $100 bills, DePorter said, and have been funneled to the cashier's office from all across the University. All cash and checks from every University department go through the cashier's office before being deposited. The bills she's seen are of "very, very poor" quality -- some, she said, look like they were simply xeroxed. But it's the one $50 bill that DePorter said concerns her most. "They've made such a big thing about how these bills are going to be so hard to counterfeit," DePorter said. "So people are looking at the new $50s and think they're fine." But the new money can be copied just the same as the old, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Secret Service, which investigates counterfeiting. The difference, he said, is that counterfeits of the new bills are easier to detect. "It's not that it's more difficult to counterfeit; it's more difficult to counterfeit well," he said, meaning that it is up to the public to "know what genuine currency is." "One problem is that most of the American public doesn't take the time to authenticate its currency," the spokesperson said. Indeed, according to DePorter, the fake bills she has seen should all have been detected immediately as counterfeit. "They look like they've been made in 10 minutes," she said. Some of them had the same serial number, while on others, the coloring was off or they simply felt fake to the touch. DePorter said her division has bought 200 counterfeit-marking pens, which can be used to determine whether currency is real, and will distribute them among the various Penn departments that accept cash. She plans to send all of the bills to the Philadelphia branch office of the Secret Service. The Treasury Department has been slowly putting the redesigned currency into circulation; new $100 bills went public two years ago and the new $50 bill was released last year. And earlier this month, the redesigned $20 bill went into circulation. The new bills' most obvious difference is that the face shot of the given presidents and dignitaries has been shifted to the left, and there is now much more white space -- which contains invisible watermarks. Three years ago, a rash of counterfeit bills led University officials to institute a policy under which no bills over $20 would be accepted. But with the advent of the new currency, the policy is no longer being strictly enforced, DePorter said.