‘You’re looking nice today’

How a banknote forger distracted unsuspecting retail staff Counterfeit banknotes are regularly being presented in shops, supermarkets and pubs throughout New Zealand. Is it greed, or desperation? Tony Wall investigates.

Nicholas Parker and his partner wandered into the Pricewise store in Mt Maunganui’s Bayfair shopping mall on a Friday afternoon last April. He headed for the deodorant; she went over to the makeup section.

The only other person in the shop was the on-duty manager, Jasmine Strickland, 24, who had been working in retail for about 10 months.

As Parker, 38, headed to the counter carrying a sewing kit, a can of Lynx body spray and a tube of Colgate toothpaste, he asked his partner ‘‘Do you have anything smaller?’’, meaning banknotes.

She said no, so he handed Strickland a $50 note. As he did this, he complimented her: ‘‘You’ve got such nice hair, you’re looking really nice today.’’

‘‘That’s what got me,’’ says

Strickland. ‘‘That’s his way of [distracting you] and getting you to quickly change the money and give him the change.

‘‘I did have a rough morning . . . For him to say that lifted my spirits.’’

Strickland handed Parker $37 in change and wished him a nice day.

A bit later, she asked a coworker to take several $50 notes to the bank to change them for smaller denominations.

The colleague returned, saying the change machine had spat out one of the notes and it looked fake.

On closer inspection, Strickland saw the note did not have serial numbers and the printing wasn’t ‘‘proper’’. The note was made from paper, instead of the synthetic polymer used by the offshore printing companies that produce New Zealand banknotes.

Strickland searched the mall and found Parker near the Subway sandwich stand. With the help of an off-duty police officer who happened to be passing, she confronted him and he handed back the $37 and goods.

Parker gave a false name and left the mall, but the officer took a photo of him on his phone. That photo was

circulated among police, leading to Parker’s arrest about three weeks later in Tokoroa.

The fake $50 was one of 580 forged banknotes examined by the police document section so far this year – already more than for all of last year.

There has been a spike in the number of counterfeit bills being presented in the past three years – peaking in 2019 when police were sent 1200 notes.

On an international scale, the problem is small, according to the Reserve Bank and police, with counterfeits accounting for only about four banknotes out of each million in circulation.

That compares with 15 per million in Australia – where the Reserve Bank typically receives about 30,000 counterfeits a year – and about 100 per million in the United States.

While Hollywood depicts counterfeiters as criminal masterminds producing near-perfect forgeries on expensive commercial printers, the reality – in New Zealand at least – is far different.

Here, forged bills are mostly made by lone, low-level criminals using cheap inkjet printers, reams of A4 paper, and clear sticky-tape to reproduce the see-through windows.

Most counterfeits are easily identified by the feel and look, says Reserve Bank spokesman Peter Northcote. ‘‘No security features on New Zealand’s polymer banknotes have been successfully compromised by the work of counterfeiters.’’

Using counterfeit notes is unlikely to be a quick route to riches and the high life – most people are caught eventually, through CCTV cameras or fingerprints on the bills.

When police arrested Parker at his former partner’s place in Tokoroa, they found him in bed, surrounded by a printer, practice notes, stacks of paper, a roll of clear film, glue and bottles of dye, as well as a stack of fake $50 notes.

He was charged with multiple counts of possessing equipment capable of being used to forge a document, possessing forged banknotes and using forged documents. The most serious charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.

Parker, an aluminium joiner by trade, had gone on a spending spree between January and

April, passing his fake notes at petrol stations, supermarkets, takeaway stores and other shops in Rotorua, Tauranga, Hamilton, Cambridge, Putaruru and Taupo¯ .

The shopkeepers spotted the fakes only a couple of times – mostly Parker would walk away with the goods he’d purchased, and real change. If the worker called him out, he’d act surprised and claim he’d been given the note at a nearby store.

The police summary of facts says Parker had spent considerable time perfecting his forgeries: ‘‘The only obvious discrepancies between the forged notes . . . and genuine notes are the type of paper used and the absence of the watermark.’’

Parker pleaded guilty to most of the charges and will be sentenced in August. He told police he made the counterfeit notes because he had no money and needed accommodation, food and clothes.

In April, he and his partner turned up at the Tokoroa home of the mother of his children, Dawn Hall, asking if they could stay for a while. ‘‘He handed me

some money, I went, ‘Oh cool, you’re gonna contribute to your children,’ and he was like, ‘Nah, it’s not even real’,’’ Hall says. ‘‘It looked real at first glance, but if you studied it, you’d see it wasn’t.’’

At one point, Parker asked

her to return a printer to The Warehouse ‘‘because it wasn’t the one he wanted’’, but she says she had no idea he was printing bills in his bedroom, until police knocked on the door.

‘‘I was disappointed because I allowed them to stay here – they could have used that as a stepping stone. He’s an amazing builder, he can walk into a job with his qualifications . . . but I know things have been a struggle for him.’’

Gordon Sharfe, chief document examiner for police, says overseas, near-perfect counterfeit notes have been produced, such as the so-called ‘‘Superdollar’’ believed to have been made by the North Korean government.

Here, ‘‘the quality does vary depending on the paper and whether the ink is running out on the printer. Also, inkjet inks are water-soluble, so if someone splashes some water on it – we get quite a few where the ink’s run.’’

Scammers will use tricks such as scrunching up a bill and talking to the shopkeeper to distract them, Sharfe says. ‘‘That’s how they get away with it because no-one is actually looking.

‘‘Culturally in New Zealand we don’t expect counterfeits . . . whereas in Europe it’s not unusual for you to hand over a euro . . . in a bar and they’ll put it under a UV light.’’

Tony Campbell, of the Celtic Arms in Christchurch, says he had an infra-red light for reading banknote security features installed after a man passed eight fake $100 bills over the bar in May 2019, receiving real $20 notes in exchange.

The man, Cody Togo, passed counterfeits at shops in Christchurch, Nelson, Wakefield, Timaru and Greymouth between 2019 and 2020, receiving hundreds of dollars in change before he was eventually caught and sentenced to two years’ intensive supervision.

Campbell says staff now check all $20, $50 and $100 notes under the UV light.

‘‘It’s brilliant, it’s pretty hard for them to do it now – most pubs have got them [the lights].’’

Togo also ripped off a man who was selling a car for $1000 on Facebook Marketplace – meeting the seller late at night and handing over counterfeit $100 notes before driving off with the vehicle.

Sharfe says that, while retailers bear the brunt of counterfeits, people selling goods in online market places need to be careful.

Eftpos has meant people are less familiar with cash nowadays, he says. ‘‘People need to be more aware . . . and pay more attention to banknotes.’’

Strickland, the Pricewise worker, says checks on surveillance cameras showed Parker came into the mall with a group of four others, so they probably planned to pass fake notes at numerous shops.

Parker’s routine was to ‘‘act dumb. His character is a dumb person, so you feel like there’s nothing suspicious around him’’.

She’s happy she was able to help catch a fraudster, but was hurt by his deceit, after he’d made the comment about her hair.

‘‘I was quite sad, because I thought that was a true compliment.’’