China might be known as the world’s supermarket to some, and while their quality control has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, there are still kinks in their manufacturing process that pushes them to the forefront with undesirable news – such as poisonous ingredients used in baby formula and the like. For a fair number of years, if you have always wanted to get bootleg products, China is the place to go, and while fakes or clones of the iPhone are certainly irritating to have around, the trouble meter starts ringing loud and clear when bootleg bills start to circulate.
In fact, it seems that some Chinese ATMs have started to distribute bogus bills to civilians, and these counterfeits are so good, that even ATM machines which are meant to dispense (and possibly check for) real bills were fooled by them. Unfortunately, the concerned banks in China do not believe that this is such a case. For example, a bunch of Japanese exchange students withdrew 3,000 yuan (US$490) from an ATM in China, but upon discovering that seven of those 30 bills were counterfeits, they approached the bank, only to be dismissed by the said banks, which say that it is impossible for an ATM to distribute counterfeit bills. Well, perhaps one might want to obtain money over the bank counter itself the next time around, or should we revert to the barter system?
The thing is, we do not know how common this is, and how widespread would it end up, and how many banks are affected. Still, I think that one occurrence of this is way too many.