Man orders just one Corona at the bar. Then he pays with $100 bill. Then the bartender uses a money marker
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Most workers in the service industry have weathered enough storms to be able to sniff out some scheming nonsense. Every day, they have to face belligerent customers who try everything from getting out of paying for their meals to pretending their meals weren’t satisfactory.
Considering these battles workers face daily, is it any wonder one bartending story is going viral for featuring a new brand of customer-caused tomfoolery? This time, the antics take the form of cold, hard cash.
The story
In a video posted recently, which has more than a million views, bar manager Kellie (@ambryrae) detailed a bizarre customer interaction she handled at her job. The customer was normal at first, but things quickly took a turn.
“One time, this young guy came in for lunch and sat at the bar,” Kellie said in her video. “He didn’t order any food. The only thing that he ordered was a bottle of Corona.”
The customer apparently sat at the bar for a bit, drank his beer, and then tried to pay for it. Pretty standard stuff, right? Wrong. He pulled out a $100 bill—so the bartender followed the appropriate protocol.
“So the bartender takes [the bill], she checks it, she uses the money marker… When she puts the line on it, it comes out black. If you’ve used a money marker before, then it clearly tells you that if the pen is dark brown or if it’s black, then that most likely means that the bill is counterfeit.”
Naturally, the bartender told the customer that “the mark on the bill is not the color that it’s supposed to be.” She gave him a chance to make things right. But the man refused to offer an alternative method of payment.
“He immediately gets annoyed,” Kellie said. “He tells her that he doesn’t have another way to pay, and of course, he asked to see a manager.”
Kellie’s reaction to the bill
Enter Kellie, the manager in question. Kellie saw the incriminating mark“plain as day” and clearly communicated that the bar was “uncomfortable” accepting his money. Growing louder, the customer doubled down and refused to change his payment method. He insisted that the $100 was all he had with him.
Kellie offered to pay for the bottle herself, and the customer got even more inflamed. He wanted change, which told her that he might have been lying about the bill’s origins. Kellie’s suspicions that the dollar was fraudulent solidified when she suggested he take the bill to a bank to get change, and he refused. Changing out fraudulent currency is a common scam, which takes advantage of employees who don’t check the bill.
The customer claimed he’d gotten the bill from a manager at that very same bar the day before. Kellie, however, told him that she would involve law enforcement, which made him leave the business.
“If you’re saying that we gave this to you, then it’s really time for us to get the police involved,” Kellie said to him. “Because that means somebody is in this building passing around counterfeit bills.”
Kellie’s viewers agreed that her intuition was correct. In the comment section of her video, one phrase echoed repeatedly from multiple commenters: “He knew it was fake.”
How do money markers work?
The counterfeit money marker at Kellie’s bar clearly came in handy, but how does it work, anyway? What causes the ink in money markers to change colors according to the authenticity of the bill?
It all comes down to a pretty simple chemical reaction, thanks to a unique, starch-free paper used exclusively by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. According to How Stuff Works, counterfeit detector markers or pens contain “an iodine solution that reacts with the starch in wood-based paper to create a black, dark blue or brown stain.” For real bills, the ink shows up as a light shade of yellow.
However, these pens aren’t completely foolproof. If a counterfeiter dissolves and scrapes the ink off a real $20 bill, they can then print over it to make it look like a $100 bill.
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