Orange County Flooded With Phony $20 Bills

Responding to a flood of phony $20 bills entering the country from Mexico, federal agents warned Monday that counterfeiting rings have begun preying on unsuspecting Latino immigrants in Orange County and other parts of Southern California.

“The dollar amount is relatively low because of the denomination,” said Tom Keeley, a U.S. Secret Service agent in Los Angeles, “but it’s probably the most widely distributed group of notes in the history of the Secret Service.”

Federal agents believe that the influx of fake bills is rooted in a black-market operation in Mexico that has forged a quick trail north, hitting places such as the El Toro Meat Shop in Santa Ana, which is situated in the heart of the Latino community in Orange County.

“I am personally inspecting the big bills,” said shop partner Joe Bonilla, who said he has noticed a sharp increase in suspicious-looking currency. He now instructs all his employees to scratch the presidential portraits on the bills to check for texture and other signs of authenticity.

Secret Service agents are trying--with little success so far--to crack what they said are two separate counterfeiting rings issuing bogus $20 bills intended for the Latino immigrant community. The first series, all bearing the same serial number, turned up a year ago; the second surfaced in January of this year.

“If you compared it with a known genuine, you wouldn’t have a problem identifying the counterfeit,” said Clint Howard, special agent-in-charge of the Secret Service’s Los Angeles district, about any of the phony bills.

Howard had a press conference Monday to warn the public about the problem. He said the paper, printing, texture and delineation of the bills in both of the phony series give them away. He added that members of two groups of counterfeiters believed to be operating in the immigrant community are preying on people who do not “know what American currency looks like.”

Since January, federal agents have confiscated more than $300,000 in phony bills from the two groups. Most had been turned in to banks or other financial institutions.

Keeley, who heads the counterfeit unit in the Secret Service’s Los Angeles district office, said agents are now taking in about $20,000 a week from what they believe are two rings. About $12,000 of that is coming from Los Angeles and about $1,200 is from Orange County, he said.

“The numbers from Santa Ana are big,” he said, pointing out that agents are now confiscating in a week as much as they had usually been taking in over a month.

Federal agents are not sure how much counterfeit money from the two series is in circulation, although Keeley speculated that it could be more than $1 million.

What is known, they said, is that the counterfeiters responsible for the latest influxes have managed, through using the immigrant population, to secure a far bigger niche than Secret Service agents have encountered in previous cases.

“The distributors of these bills have access to a large number of individuals, and they have distribution channels of an extent we haven’t seen before,” Howard said. Howard added that he has beefed up staffing on the counterfeit unit in his office because of the problem.

Federal agents speculate that the money is being made in Mexico. They said they suspect that somewhere near the U.S. border, the counterfeit cash is traded for pesos from immigrants planning to travel illegally to the United States.

From the border, the bills follow the same path as the immigrants--to Santa Ana, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, and other parts of the Southwest. “Wherever you see large concentrations of new arrivals,” Keeley says, “you’ll see this note.”

“It’s just despicable how people can victimize those who are already poor and struggling. . . . But that seems to be the mentality of these con people,” said Lila Powell, executive director of the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights and Responsibilities.

Agents say they have detained more than 100 immigrants--most of them illegal aliens--who have been carrying the phony $20 bills. The immigrants, however, have been little help in cracking the rings, Keeley said, because they have either refused to identify the source of the money or have lied. They have, however, been deported back to Mexico, agents said.

“They tell us they got it from Humberto, and Humberto tells us he got it from Jose, and Jose is gone,” Keeley said. “In my experience, they’re not being honest with you.”

In making his warning, Howard said merchants in Latino neighborhoods should check $20 bills closely. It is merchants who may be stuck with the bills should they prove fraudulent because a bank will not accept them, officials said.

Local officials said, however, that many Latinos already seem to be aware of the problem.

Jose Vargas, the Latino affairs officer for the Santa Ana Police Department, said: “I don’t know exactly how many cases we have had, but from just talking to people out on the street, several people have come to me to express their concern that they have been victimized by being given counterfeit $20 bills. They have been asking how to protect themselves.”