A new kind of high-quality counterfeit 100 yuan ($16.3) note has recently been found circulating in several cities around China, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The new counterfeit notes, whose serial numbers start with "C1F9," are said to be one of the country's most successful examples of bank note forgery, good enough to fool fake currency detectors in banks.
The first 100 yuan fake bill, whose serial number was C1F9605156, was found by police in Yinan, Shandong Province, on June 23.
The police claimed that the fake note was first spotted in a shop in a remote rural area, but the shop owner could not pinpoint the person who had spent it.
Beijing, Ningbo in East China's Zhejiang Province and Chongqing also saw counterfeit notes with similar serial numbers. Some recipients claimed it is extremely hard to tell these notes are fake, compared with other fake notes they had seen before.
"You really need to make a large investment to forge notes with different serial numbers. So counterfeit notes usually have the same codes in order to cut costs," Xu Huang, a manager from the Nantong branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in East China's Jiangsu Province, told the Global Times.
The fake note in Beijing was found by a computer seller who brought the note to a bank for examination on June 28. The bank's currency detector recognized the note as authentic two out of five times, the Beijing News reported.
"Some sophisticated 100 yuan counterfeit notes are produced with one side genuine and the other fake to gain a higher chance of not being detected by these devices," Xu said, "which is usually why a bank clerk is required to send the note through a machine at least twice to check both sides."
"The counterfeit note I received looks whitened. And apparently it is thinner than a genuine one," Zeng Li, a recipient of a fake 100 yuan note in Chongqing told the Chongqing Morning Post on Tuesday.
She added that it is easy to identify fake notes, but she was too busy to notice when she received hers.
Even though the fake notes could slip through examination by devices, there are ways to pick them out with the naked eye.
According to the People's Bank of China in August, 2011, the three-dimensional watermark of a genuine 100 yuan note will only be seen when it is against a light, while the watermark of a fake note is not three-dimensional and can easily be seen even if it is on a desk.
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