Rachael Whitfield holds a bill to try to determine if it is a counterfeit during a Better Business Bureau workship led by the Secret Service.

Lindsay A. miller / Arizona daily star

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'Tis the season for funny money.

To combat counterfeiting as the holidays approach, the Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona hosted a workshop with the U.S. Secret Service to help retailers spot bogus bills.

"It's something people here need to be aware of for a couple of important reasons," said Tom Collier, president of the BBB Southern Arizona chapter. "The first is obviously that holiday shopping season is coming up, and the second is that with our proximity to the Mexico border and the drug trade, we have a higher prevalence of that stuff."

About a quarter of million dollars of counterfeit bills pass hands in Southern Arizona every year, special agent Kevin Adams of the U.S. Secret Service's Tucson office told about about 15 local businesses at the workshop.

The workshop featured video presentations on the security features that have been added to bills since the 1990s and on methods of counterfeiting.

Adams ended the session by passing around an assortment of genuine notes and counterfeit ones collected by the agency to workshop attendees, testing them to see if they could determine their authenticity.

One key tip Adams delivered: Don't depend on the counterfeit-detection pens used by so many businesses. Such pens contain a solution that reacts with the starch in wood-based paper to create a dark stain. Genuine currency paper is made from linen and cotton and doesn't react.

"People tend to rely on the counterfeit pen as a kind of catch-all, and we do not endorse the use of the pen," Adams said. "The problem is they will often give you a false positive, especially with older money. If you have an old bill, it's going to turn dark on you when you use the pen, even though the note is genuine." Ditch the pen for a magnifying glass, one that magnifies at least 10 times, he said.

"The thing to do with a suspect bill is to take it and compare it to a known genuine bill of similar series and look for the subtle differences," Adams said.

For the most part, the fine details of even offset-printed counterfeit bills — bills made with professional printing presses and methods — will be blurred and indistinct when compared to genuine notes, he said.

The emergence of color inkjet printers and copy machines has increased the incidence of counterfeit notes. The tip-off for notes made with inkjet copiers and printers under magnification are tiny droplets of yellow, pink, blue and black dots all over the bills, Adams said.

Security features on U.S. currency after 1996 include color-shifting ink that goes from copper to green when you tilt the bill, security threads inscribed with the denomination of the note, and watermarks —faint images similar to the corresponding portraits — that show when held up to light, he said.

Additional security features were added in 2004, including subtle background colors and microprintings featuring tiny "flying" numbers and letters.

Even with the new security features, detecting phony bills is still a daunting task, said Sarah Bailey, a Nogales rancher concerned over the proliferation of counterfeit noes in her area.

"I was floored at how clever some of the counterfeits were," she said. "I came away thinking I'd flub it every time." Bailey hopes to arrange a workshop on counterfeiting for business owners and residents in Nogales.

The BBB's Collier echoed Bailey's concern, adding that a common myth among businesspeople is that they'll recoup for counterfeit bills turned over to police or the Secret Service.

"People don't think it's that much of a crime because they just assume there is an agency somewhere out there that will replace that money for them and that's simply not true," he said. "That's why counterfeiting is so damaging."