Cash or card?
Why do crooks forge 50s and not 100s?
Why do people always say they work at a local business, or in a local hospital, or for the local police? Would you assume that someone rises, gets dressed, breakfasts, and then goes off to work somewhere 500 miles away? Anyhow, I work part-time as a cashier in a local supermarket. The supermarket is 3.2 miles from my house, and that’s pretty local in my book: it’s local if you can bike it.
At the end of the shift, we need to do a reconciliation between what the cash register says we should have in the till and what we in fact have in the till. What we get in the till can be customer account receipts, credit or debit card payments, vouchers, as well as meal vouchers (which, oddly, don’t count as vouchers but as card payments), and, naturally (or not so very naturally, depending how you view it), cash. All of these means of payment get recorded on a reconciliation sheet.
The card payments are processed separately, not through the cash register itself, and it is the cleared amount recorded on that payment acknowledgement that gets entered into the cash register as a payment. Once the amount paid that’s shown reaches the total purchase amount, the cash register opens (it always assumes there will be a need to insert something, like bank note, even if the payment is by credit card), and the itemised customer receipt is automatically printed.
We get a lot of English-speaking people in the shop, and on the whole they come from the higher echelons of our local society: many work for the European Union institutions. But some customers are Belgian locals, and live in the village or surrounding area. In order to progress the transaction, especially when we’re busy, I will often ask the customer, as they pack their things into their shopping bags, whether they intend to pay by cash or card. Occasionally they will imperiously advise me that they are currently otherwise occupied and I’m to jolly well wait until they’re finished (they don’t realise the question is intended to hasten their departure (which is a shame, in a way, when you get an answer like that)). Sometimes the customer needs to think about it. They may ask “Do you take cash?” to which I do not say, “Would I have asked if we didn’t?” but rather, “Yes.” Sometimes the question is one word longer: “Do you still take cash?” to which I reply, “It’s a legal requirement”, which it is, even if many government agencies won’t accept cash. Not at the town hall, not at the electricity board, not at hospitals. No cash there. But we take it.
Once it’s established that the shop will take their cash (I sometimes jocularly tell customers, “We take all your money!”), the customer may still swither and eventually pay by card anyway, but at least we’ve had an amusing little exchange. But, when the intention is to pay by card from the outset, a pattern is discernible; an almost immutable pattern. Belgians will immediately tell me “Met de kaart” meaning they advise you as soon as the total is known of how they want to pay—by card. EU functionaries will wordlessly fiddle and delve into their pockets to retrieve wallets and then leaf through the multitude of bits of plastic and never say what it is they’re reaching for. You may think it’s a card, but they will suddenly divert their fingers to folded up euro notes, and brandish the cash, whilst meanwhile I have entered the total into the credit card machine and, when it doesn’t complete the transaction, it will beep complainingly at me as if I’ve forgotten the poor, abandoned thing. Belgians communicate with their cashiers; EU bureaucrats assume you know, almost implying that they would never sully their hands with ordinary banknotes. Some of them never see a banknote from one end of the year to the other. And that means they pay their taxes, all 3 per cent. I’m grateful.
Sometimes people apologise because they only have cash. I tell them, “When you pay with cash, no one knows you were here, or how much you spent, or what you bought. They would if you paid by card,” and they regard me wide-eyed as if I had just told them the secret of eternal life. That’s nonsense, I haven’t. But I have told them one of the secrets of secret life.
Our cash reconciliation sheets have a line entry for 200-euro notes. Then 100-euro notes, 50s, 20s, etc. (It actually also has lines for 2 and 1 cent coins, but we don’t use those any more.) Last week, a lady bought something for a very small amount and, as I gave her her change, she asked if I wouldn’t mind changing a 100-euro note for two 50s. I apologised and said that, if she bought something (which, silly me, she just had, albeit for one euro fifty, or something like that), I could accept the note as payment and give her change, but that the shop is not prepared to run the risk of a dud 100-euro note just as a favour for exchange purposes. She understood. But I don’t.
If, in the course of a day’s shift at the cash desk, I take 400 euros in cash, that is already quite a lot. The vast majority of sales are card sales. The shop doesn’t actually invest in a bill-checker machine, to verify whether a tendered banknote is genuine or not. But it is common knowledge that by far the most frequent forgeries are 50-euro and 20-euro notes. Not 100-euro notes, or 200-euro notes. Changing the lady’s 100-euro note for two 50s would therefore have involved more risk for her than for us. And that has to do with what 100-euro notes, as opposed to 50-euro notes, are used for.
Fifty-euro notes are the highest denomination in common circulation. If people pay in cash, it is far from rare to receive a 50-euro note. That is why they are the most-forged notes: because of the fact that they are so common, and so often used, even in a credit card society, it is relatively easy to pass them off as genuine. The same goes for 20s. But 100-euro notes are not in such high demand, because you don’t go very far before having to break the note and that can be awkward at a small business that doesn’t carry that much float in its cash register. So, you might ask, why do they even print 100-euro notes? Because they do print them. In fact, on one estimate, there are currently billions of euro banknotes in circulation that never get presented in shops to buy things. Ever.
Aside from 200 and 100-euro notes, we also have 500 and 1,000-euro notes, but these are rarer. The 100 and 200-euro notes are not quite as popular worldwide as the American 100-dollar bill, but they are up there, and the reason for their popularity is that they make money-laundering easier. Central banks are aware of this and appear to be blithe as to the consequences. Seriously, wilfully, almost criminally blithe.
Of course, smuggling bank notes on your person is dicey, given the airport security these days. But even assuming the amount carried is not beyond the 10,000 dollar limit and they’re acting entirely legally, a 100-euro note does make things that bit more comfortable for the courier. However, millions of dollars, euros and pounds get shipped across the world, not by mules but by containers. When the Liverpudlian actor and comedian Ken Dodd was prosecuted for hoarding suitcases of cash on which he had paid no income tax in 1989, the judge asked, “What does 100,000 pounds in a suitcase feel like?” to which Dodd replied, “The notes are very light, M’Lord.” But put enough of them in a shipping container, they probably (a) become that bit more weighty and (b) amount to that bit more than 100,000 pounds. That’s how most dirty money circulates around the globe. It’s how Hezbollah and Hamas are financed by Iran: cases of 100-dollar bills. Untraceable, and well outside any electronic system. Hezbollah communicates nowadays using boys on motorcycles, carrying bits of paper, likewise to mitigate the possibility of electronic detection. One thing I haven’t yet quite fathomed is the electronic trail left by Jeffrey Epstein in the millions of e-mails on file. To my mind, it would indicate a laxness that implies a sense of utter impunity; or a sense that what was communicated was small potatoes, compared to the hard-core stuff; or they’re fakes, or lures for the stupid and unwary. I don’t think they’re fakes; they could be lures, but it does take some fathoming.
If you tighten the money-launderers’ means of transiting the banking system, don’t think for a second that they will then simply give up. No, the ones who give up are governments, who complain loudly that they simply don’t have the resources to police their own laws. If one were less kind, one might opine that the politicians who allocate so few resources to enforcing smuggling laws have as much interest in the smugglers’ success as do the smugglers.
Getting back to the lady who wanted to change a hundred: there are far fewer sketchy 100-euro notes than 50-euro notes for that one simple reason: 50-euro notes are used by locals. And 100-euro notes are used by global criminals, and they certainly don’t want to end up with dud currency themselves, so that’s why they don’t forge it.