Getting Rid of a Fake $5 Bill

Counterfeit money is quite common here in Ecuador. If you’re smart, every time someone hands you a bill, you’ll rub it between your fingers and hold it up to the light to verify the watermark. If you’re overcautious or not confident in your ability to play a US Treasury officer, you can buy a special marker from your local shouting street vendor that, when used on a bill, indicates its validity. I should have bought one of those. If you assume that growing up in the United States helps develop an infallible skill for identifying fake money, you assume wrong. In fact, growing up in the States actually makes you more gullible in accepting false bills. You trust that a shop owner will give you the correct change, and you trust that the ATM will spit out real money. Unfortunately, these are assumptions you should not make. In fact, getting fake money can end up costing you much more than just the loss of the original value of the bill. Let me help you understand the emotional process.

You walk into a store and pick out a pack of gum. Do you need the gum? No. What you need is the change. You just went to the ATM to get some cash and, of course, the machine spit out all your money in $20 bills. What are $20 bills in Ecuador? Useless. Your primary expenditures in Ecuador are $1 taxi rides, 20¢ bus rides, and 50¢ ice cream cones. None of these essentials can be purchased with your $20 bills. People here like change, and only after a ten-minute haggling process can you possibly get a taxi driver to break your $20. So after going to the ATM, you are forced to go out of your way to your local chain grocery store and buy a pack of gum for the mere purpose of buying something small that will break up your twenty into usable units in Ecuador. You know that the grocery store cashier won’t be happy, but they’ll break your twenty because they are large enough to find some change lying around.

You walk into the store and quickly grab a pack of gum. While walking up to the checkout counter, you smile to yourself, thinking, “Haha. Sucker. I’m about to hand this guy $20 to pay for a pack of gum, and he’s going to have to take it. I’m so clever.” As you smirk and hand your $20 over to the cashier, you fail to notice the cashier is also smirking. The cashier, to your surprise, gladly accepts your $20 bill and quickly counts out your change. Too bad you can’t read minds because he’s thinking, “Yes, a stupid gringa! This is my lucky day.”

Ready to get on your way, you stuff the change the cashier handed you into your pocket in a joyful mood. Not only have you managed to break your $20 bill, but you’ve managed to do it in a hassle-free way. “It’s only 10am, but this has already been a pretty successful day,” you think to yourself as you pop a piece of Trident in your mouth.
Stepping off the bus on your way back home, still in a good mood, you decided to treat yourself to an ice cream cone. You walk to your local corner store and select your favorite Pinguino flavor. Then, you walk up to the register and, to push your luck, pay with the largest acceptable bill you can, $5 left over from the grocery store. The teen picks up your bill, feels it, and tells you that you’ll have to pay with something else because your $5 is fake. What? Fake? Then is suddenly dawns on you why the cashier at the grocery store was so happy. He had a fake $5 that he needed to get rid of and you, the trusting American, provided a perfect opportunity.

You dig up change to pay for your ice cream and huff out of the store. You reexamine your $5 bill. Sure enough, plain as day, it’s a fake. It’s thinner than normal. It’s also too smooth. And when you hold it up to the Equatorial sun, you see no watermark. You curse yourself for having been duped.
Now at this point, most people would kick the dirt, curse their bad luck, and save the $5 as a souvenir to show people back home. But oh, no. Not you. You’re smarter than that. You’ve been in Ecuador a while. A long time ago you accepted that what goes around comes around. No one is going to get the best of this gringa. You’re going to find a way to pawn this bogus bill off on some other unsuspecting victim.

For the next week, you try your best to get rid of your phony money. First, you try to buy several packs of gum from random corner stores with your $5. Not one of the cashiers accepts your money. You decide to try a different strategy, buy more expensive items and hide the five in between other dollar bills so the cashier won’t notice. No, you don’t need a 2-pound bag of Snickers, but at $8, buying it will allow you to try your new strategy and put your $5 in between a few one-dollar bills. You check out. Caught. Maybe you need to modify your stragegy and try to hide your $5 in bigger bills. Every time you go to the mall you’ve looked at the $40 game of Taboo in the toy store. You know you don’t need it. Hell, at one tenth of your salary you can’t even really afford it. But, you know it would give you a chance to try out your new theory of hiding the money inside bigger bill denominations. You try. Failure. You now have a game of Taboo you didn’t need, and you still have your fake $5.
Now at this point, a lot of people might throw in the towel and say, “Okay, no one is going to take my $5. I should count my losses and move on.” But not you. One of your best personality traits is that you are perseverant, even when the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you.

The next day, you are hanging out in the park, and a little boy comes up and asks to polish your shoes. Normally, you say no to this service, especially when you are wearing your Converse Chuck Taylors, but today, you accept his offer. The boy finishes discoloring your shoes, and you hand him your $5 and ask for change. Part of you feels bad about trying to give this boy a fake, but then again, life’s not fair. This boy needs to learn that, and today, you’ve been given the opportunity to teach him. After all, you are down here volunteering as a teacher. Who says that needs to be limited to the classroom?
The boy takes your bill, feels it for a minute, looks at you, says something in Quichua, and shakes his head while handing the money back to you. He holds his hand out demanding real money. You mumble something under your breath like, “I swear they teach kids what a fake $5 bill feels like before they even teach them how to count.”

Later that week you find yourself in front of a hot dog stand. You don’t particularly want a hot dog, especially given its likelihood of making you sick, but you are going to buy one anyway. Why are you going to buy one? Because the owner of the hot dog stand is an old, half-blind woman. The pads of her hands, which were specially cultivated since childhood to detect counterfeit money, have long been calloused, and you suspect they are now likely to fail her. You feel bad for what you’re about to do and have trouble justifying this as some sort of lesson for this old woman, but at this point, you’ve run out of all other options. You order a hot dog and hand the woman your $5. Two seconds later she’s giving you your fake five back and asking you to pay with real money. What is it with this country? You’re beginning to wonder why they even sell markers that detect fake bills when everyone already has magical sensors built into their hands and special imitation implants built into their eyes.

You decide, finally, that it’s time to give up. Trying to get rid of this $5 has indirectly made you spend over $60 buying merchandise you didn’t really need. You finish your hot dog, and as you pass a beggar on the sidewalk, you drop your $5 into his hat. As you walk away, you can see out of the corner of your eye that the beggar has reached into his hat and is frowning. You feel his disgusted eyes on your back as you turn the corner and board your bus toward home. You sigh at the thought of your defeat. But then, as you sit there, you can’t help but smile a little as you think of what’s waiting for you at home, a 2-pound bag of Snickers.