‘It’s scary what people are doing now’: Hawaii woman scrubs $1 bill, attempts to pass it off as $100. How to stretch your dollar without risking jail time

Maelyn Ramos, a cashier at Ohana Foods in Hilo, Hawaii, had an inkling something was wrong when a customer handed her a $100 bill for a $15 purchase.

“I did our protocols and procedures which is to mark the bill with the marker and lift it up to see if it has the black line that all real money has,” Ramos told KHON2 News last month. “When she gave me the bill, it looked different from a regular $100.”

When the customer told Ramos it was an old bill, she compared it to an old bill in the store’s tip jar, noting the genuine old bill had more of a yellowish tone. Ramos used a counterfeit bill detector pen to test the money — but the mark it left behind was yellow, indicating it was real currency.

When Ramos lifted up the bill to the light just to be sure, she noticed a faded “1” marking in the top corner and faint lettering printed on the bill, and she took out a $1 bill to compare.

“I realized this is real money, it was a one dollar bill they bleached or washed and printed $100 on top,” Ramos said.

“My gut instinct was telling me something was wrong, and it's scary what people are doing now because a lot of people would have looked at it and said it’s real — which I was close to doing at that point — but something in me was like, it doesn’t look okay.”