About five years ago, I was moving apartments, and some of my coworkers offered to help me. I decided to withdraw about $100 to buy them pizza or something in g

About five years ago, I was moving apartments, and some of my coworkers offered to help me. I decided to withdraw about $100 to buy them pizza or something in gratitude (spoiler alert: they didn't accept any material gratitude.) So I went to an ATM that belonged to a local credit union and I withdrew 5 $20 bills. Then I popped into a pharmacy, where I was a regular customer and the workers knew me, and I requested that they break the $20 while I purchased some candy or something inexpensive. The pharmacy technician looked suspiciously at the bill I gave him, turned it around in the light, asked a coworker what he thought, and he handed it back to me, saying, "This is counterfeit money. We can't accept it." A bit more context: this pharmacy was at a very busy crossroads of tourism, college students, and rambunctious homeless people. So I slightly freaked out but I promptly reached into my wallet and pulled out a second $20 and said "here, how about this one?" and each bill was roundly rejected in turn. They didn't say why or point out the deficiencies on them, they just flat refused to accept them as legal tender. So I got out of there and I took my wallet full of funny-money directly to my credit union. Hey, what do you do when you've just been caught passing $100 in counterfeit currency? You stick your neck out and try to get arrested or something? So I approached the teller window and I showed them the money, and explained how it was rejected. And the banker started examining it, and called over a second guy to check it out, and they scoffed and they said it's all real, don't worry about it. And then we had an interesting conversation about what a retail worker is really supposed to do when presented with counterfeit money. Of course I learned my lesson that day, and I was very silly to ever doubt the authenticity of the money. I am fairly well-versed in the common security features of American money, and I could tell just by look and feel that they were all present on these bills, so if they had been counterfeit, they were really, really good!