Prefectural Police announced that counterfeit ¥1,000 bills have appeared in shops in the middle part of the island since late May.  They have alerted local retail stores to be careful about paper quality, size and thickness of the ¥1,000 bills they receive.

According to persons familiar with the investigation, counterfeit bills were first found at convenience stores in Kadena and Yomitan.  In Okinawa and Uruma cities, more than 20 of ¥1,000 bills have been used. In each case, they were used to pay for purchases, one by one in each case.

Besides for different paper quality from the real bills, the fake bills don’t have a watermark.  A store manager who discovered one of the bills says “I noticed it is a fake bill when I tried to use it in an ATM, because the machine rejected only the fake bill while accepting the real ones I had inserted in it at the same time. Its color and size are almost the same as a real bill, but the thickness is slightly less. If one would use it at a register, nobody would notice it’s fake.”

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