The Color of (Counterfeit) Money

A woman wielding fake ten-dollar bills tried spending them at Minore’s Meats on Whalley Avenue. Three times.

“The first time she got away with it,” said Pat Minore, the store’s owner, sitting behind a large desk in his back room office. He pulled one of the bills out of a file cabinet.

When she came back, he said, his cashier was wise to her game and refused to accept the bills.

“She even came back a third time,” Minore said, shaking his head. “So I confronted her. I told her we knew they weren’t real, and that if she came back in I’d call the FBI.”

He alerted the local police station and emailed the director of Whalley Avenue Special Services District (WASSD), the local business development organization.

It’s happened before on Whalley.

“Occasionally, these counterfeit bills come around all at once—they all of a sudden just start popping up,” Minore explained. “Someone shows up selling them, I assume.” It probably happens a couple times a year, he guessed.

t’s no surprise, but it’s a problem. “We take a hit if we accept the bills,” Minore said—there’s no compensation for businesses duped by the fakes.

“Some businesses only discover that the bills are counterfeit when they deposit them at the bank,” said Sheila Masterson of WASSD. She alerted businesses, encouraging them to get in touch with New Haven police.

“That’s our first line of attack,” she said. “We have a good relationship with the police department on Whalley.”

Sgt. Max Joyner, top cop in the area, said he’d received the email.

“I also want to give business owners a heads up that they need to call us when they get counterfeits,” he said. Joyner emailed a response to business owners after he was alerted about Minore’s, urging them to do just that. Typically, New Haven police would refer the case to an FBI task force.

“It happens, it’s not widespread, but occasionally we do get the counterfeit call,” Joyner said. There’s no real evidence of a pattern for now.

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