MOUNT VERNON — Alert cafeteria staff at Mount Vernon High School spotted an apparent counterfeit $20 bill when a student attempted to pay for a lunch with it on Thursday.
Superintendent Steve Short said Thursday when the student tendered the bill, the cashier took the black pen and marked it and it was not a (genuine) $20 bill. “In our investigation,” he continued, “we found that the student who tried to purchase the lunch did not bring the $20 bill to school today. We are now conducting an investigation to see how it got to the school. The matter has been turned over to the (Mount Vernon) police.”
Detective Cpl. Matt Dailey is investigating the matter. He said most of the counterfeit bills he sees are $10s and $20s. When such currency is confiscated, law enforcement personnel try to trace it back to the point of origin, as in the MVHS case.
“Sometimes people just honestly get a counterfeit bill from a business or a bank,” Dailey said, “and they don’t know it is counterfeit until they actually pass it and somebody hits it with one of the markers. Then they’re like, ‘Hey, that’s not real.’ Normally by the time somebody gets a counterfeit bill, it has passed hands so many times that it is almost impossible to track back. But we keep investigating.”
