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TULSA -- Girl Scout troops in Tulsa are getting counterfeit cash for cookies.
Sarah Tyler, a mother, said, “We didn’t know they were counterfeit until we went to the bank, and the bank flagged first the $100 bill last weekend and then a $10 bill yesterday.”
Her daughter, Meredith, added, “It’s a lot of work because you have to lug all the cookies out to the place and you have to stand out for hours and hours on end in the cold just asking people over and over . . . It is fun, but it’s also just a lot of hard work to do that. To get a counterfeit bill, it’s even more work to pay it off.”
The Girl Scout troop gets 50 cents per box, but they took a major hit because of counterfeit bills.
Tyler said, ”In order to make up that $100, the girls have to sell 200 boxes of cookies. So, if we go to a booth sale and they sell 250 in three hours, which would be a good sale, almost all of that is going to go just to make up what they’ve lost.”
Now, the girls are being pro-active. Girl Scout Alaina Boyce explained, “We didn’t know at the time. If there’s marks on it, that means someone has already found out that it’s a counterfeit.”
So, the troop invested in counterfeit pens. They also are not accepting large bills. It’s a lesson they hope Girl Scouts everywhere take into account.
The best way to see if a bill is phony is to check for the security stripe.
