Counterfeiting in Latin America

Christie and I took a fun side trip to Santiago, Chile, and had a chance to stay in a beautiful suite at the W Hotel, overlooking the snow capped Andes, go see Valparaiso with my grad school classmate, Juan Pablo, and enjoy a fun walking tour of the city. All great moments that I'll cherish.

Unfortunately, we also had a frustrating moment.

We were victims of a currency scam. A common occurrence in Latin America.

What happened?

Well, on the way back to the hotel on Sunday, we were about 3 miles away and grabbed a taxi off the street. When it came time to pay, I was anticipating being given some grief because I didn't have a lot of small notes. I had a couple $20.000 notes, which is about $30 USD.

When he dropped us off, the fare was something like $5.000 Chilean pesos, and I handed over the $20.000 note. As expected, the driver asked if I had smaller bills. He held on to my note while I opened my wallet for the smaller ones. He saw a few of the green $1.000 notes and motioned towards those. I only had 4 of them, but he enthusiastically said that just paying those 4 was enough. He then gave me back the $20.000 note, and we were on our way.

It wasn't until hours later, when at the W, I tried to pay our bar bill with cash. The General Manager approached me and told me my bill was counterfeit. Right away, I knew it was the taxi driver.

So what exactly happened?

He switched the $20.000 note I gave him with a fake one, which he handed back to me.

It looked almost the same to the naked eye. Only someone who had dealt with fake currency would know the difference.

Can you tell the difference between real vs fake?

The top one is the fake one. The way to truly tell is to feel the numbers. The real one has a bit of an embossed feel, where the fake one feels like regular paper on the numbers.

On a positive note, it was only a loss of $30 USD, and could have been much worse.

Also, I understand this happens ALL THE TIME in Buenos Aires, yet, I don't think it's happened to me.

Did you know that Peru is the the country which produces the most counterfeit U.S. dollars in the world?

South America has a long history of counterfeiting, scamming, and currency issues. I should feel both flattered it happened to me and fortunate it took this long!