The East is Red, the Sun Rises, ATM Spits Out Fake Mao

I mean no offense to our great leader with this title. To be honest, I used to be stubbornly devoted to Mao Zedong, even thinking he did nothing wrong in his later years. This blog post isn’t about evaluating great leaders — dear readers, take a look at the picture below.

[img]http://lh5.google.com/image/hezongjian/Rb9YEbqA6mI/AAAAAAAAAJg/bgR4XwnAnfk/temp%20004.jpg[/img]

It’s easy to tell fake bills from real ones in the picture. The bottom two are fake, the top two are real. Fake bills aren’t rare — almost everyone encounters them. Being given fake money as change is the main source. But 100-yuan fake bills are less common, since nobody gives you 100 yuan as change. Yet this uncommon thing happened to me, and both bills came from one place: a bank ATM.

Before a business trip to Henan, I withdrew 1000 yuan from the Agricultural Bank. I put 600 into a wedding red envelope for someone, and took the remaining 400 on my trip. On the way back at the airport, at 4pm, having skipped breakfast and lunch, starving, I tried to buy some food. I casually pulled out two 100-yuan bills, only to have them casually rejected. Looking closely, they were indeed counterfeit. That’s when I recalled where those bills came from. The worst part was that Zhengzhou International Airport had no restaurants accepting cards and no ATMs nearby — I went hungry all day back to Shanghai.

ATM machines spitting out fake money is obviously an inside job at the bank. Someone buys fake bills on the black market, swaps them for real ones in the ATM, and whoever withdraws them is the unlucky one. It’s hard for customers to gather evidence. At first I was upset, but then I Googled “ATM” and “fake money” and found plenty of people as unlucky as me. One guy even got 1700 yuan all in fake bills from an ATM, and couldn’t do anything about it due to lack of evidence. That made me feel a bit better. Bank, oh bank — these days, even the bank can’t be trusted.