In Oakland County, Michigan, some scammers are working hard to make sure their pockets end up delightful this holiday season.<\/p>\n
“I imagine they’re well into $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, doing this frequently,” Tom Jones, owner of Funky Monkey Toys in Oxford, Michigan, said.<\/p>\n
The toy store has been open for over 15 years.<\/p>\n
On Black Friday, the business experienced a first: someone paying with counterfeit cash.<\/p>\n
“[A] $100 bill and they’ve bought $20 worth of merchandise, meaning they got about $75 of real money back,” Jones explained.<\/p>\n
The counterfeit marker didn’t tip employees off about the situation. They realized they’d been duped when the money was taken to the bank.<\/p>\n
“It happened here four times that I know of in Oxford. It’s also happened in Lake Orion. I don’t know if it’s the same person, individual, or group,” Jones explained.<\/p>\n
Oakland County deputies are looking into the situation. Aside from counterfeit detection pins, officials advise checking the texture of the bill. If it’s slippery, it could be fake.<\/p>\n
“Hold it to the light. There’s a watermark in bills. You can buy an inexpensive UV light. And UV lights will tell you very specifically, each denomination has a specific color, so, for example, a $5 bill is blue,” Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said.<\/p>\n
The bills used were purported to be older $100 bills.<\/p>\n
“This is just my guess; they’re actually using money paper, bleaching it and putting imprints on top,” Jones said.<\/p>\n
Since Black Friday, businesses in downtown Oxford have been on high alert.<\/p>\n
“It’s almost like an insult to these businesses. We support this community, and the community supports us,” Jones explained.<\/p>\n
\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Oakland County, Michigan, some scammers are working hard to make sure their pockets end up delightful this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[4263,143,904,46856,145,144,47426,21408],"class_list":["post-83801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-money","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-county","tag-oakland-county-sheriff039s-office","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-oxford-news","tag-scam-alert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}