Paul Diaz, the manager of a Bronx supermarket, began detecting the strange $1 bills last Monday.
Some tiny number-letter combinations on the face and back were missing or in the wrong place, George Washington’s hairline was receding excessively and a white spot under his right eye should not have been there.
He took the bills to the bank. Tellers thought they were counterfeit, so he stopped accepting them from customers. Hundreds of odd $1 bills were turned away in the next few days.
The word spread.
Across the metropolitan area, other stores began spotting discrepancies and refusing to take the bills. In the Miami area, merchants and consumers also began shying away from funny-looking $1 bills.
For six weeks now, it happens, concerned citizens across the East have been calling the Secret Service, the nation’s watchdog against counterfeit currency, to inquire about the suspicious bills.
In recent days, the volume of calls from stores, banks and ordinary people mounted steadily into the thousands.
Thursday, alarmed over the spreading public perception that millions of counterfeit $1 bills were in circulation, the New York field office of the Secret Service issued an unusual statement saying that the strange-looking bills are not counterfeit, only the result of a new, cheaper printing process.
And the Treasury Department also issued an unusual advisory to assure the public of the authenticity of some 200 million $1 bills-nearly 4 percent of the nation’s singles-that it had printed and put into circulation.
