What are these Benjamins?

April 10, 2018 5:17 PM

A friend found these two fake $100 bills with overlaid Chinese characters tucked into a stop sign in his Long Island neighborhood. What are they for? What do they say?
posted by ocherdraco to Grab Bag (4 answers total)

I think they are Death Money, which the Internet tells me is also called Hell Money. It’s meant for rituals, you can buy it here.
posted by kate blank at 5:21 PM on April 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Best answer: These are practice notes that banks used for staff training.

The Chinese characters are:
Practice notes
Specimen
For training; not for circulation

These are not hell money.
posted by applesurf at 7:06 PM on April 10, 2018 [10 favorites]

Best answer: Chinese bank teller training notes, intended to train bank employees, but used for pranks and passed as counterfeit currency. Current eBay pricing is $5 for 100.
posted by zamboni at 7:40 PM on April 10, 2018

Do banks in the US use these? I thought there were strict rules about how realistic the images of money could be.

And there are:

* Illustration must be less that .75 or more than 1.5, in linear dimension, of the currency
* Illustration must be one-sided.
* Destroy or erase anything used in the making of the illustration that contains an image or part of the illustration.

So, how do the people making these not get in trouble with the Secret Service?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:36 AM on April 11, 2018 [1 favorite]