{"id":31109,"date":"2023-10-18T15:27:13","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T21:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-police-department-warns-businesses-about-counterfeit-money\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T01:34:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T07:34:19","slug":"cortez-police-department-warns-businesses-about-counterfeit-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-police-department-warns-businesses-about-counterfeit-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Cortez Police Department warns businesses about counterfeit money"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The
The bills were found to be used at Walgreens, Auto Zone and Dollar Tree. (Crimewatch)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

The Cortez Police Department is asking local businesses to keep an eye out for counterfeit money after two recent cases of counterfeit money being used in Cortez businesses.<\/p>\n

The PD said counterfeit bills can often be identified through similar or same serial numbers, but other bills weren\u2019t discovered to be counterfeit until they were run through a bank machine.<\/p>\n

The first incident, 12301927, was reported on Oct. 7 at Walgreens. Officer Charles Osborne responded and spoke with Tracy, an employee, who said an African-American woman bought a prepaid EBT card worth $160 with counterfeit $20 bills.<\/p>\n

Though Osborne reviewed Walgreens\u2019 security footage, the woman\u2019s face couldn\u2019t be clearly seen.<\/p>\n

Upon inspection, Osborne found that five of the bills shared the same serial number of #LE92381332C, and the other three shared #JL55349288C.<\/p>\n

The bills were taken by Osborne, and the case was closed because no suspect was identified.<\/p>\n

The second, 12301950, took place Oct. 11 at Four Corners Community Bank, 77 W. Main St.<\/p>\n

Officer Michael Rivas spoke with bank employee Adrianna Gage, who said money put in the after-hours box from Auto Zone and the Dollar Tree contained counterfeit bills, which weren\u2019t identified until they were rejected by the bank machine.<\/p>\n

The counterfeit bills totaled $260 from Auto Zone and $200 from the Dollar Tree. Rivas took the counterfeit bills from the bank as well as a Department of Homeland Security United States Secret Service Counterfeit note.<\/p>\n

The manager of Auto Zone was not available when Rivas attempted to speak with him, and Dollar Tree said it would take a week or so to get the security footage, so Rivas noted in his incident report that he would be following up with both businesses.<\/p>\n

Counterfeit bills or suspected forgery can be reported to the Cortez Police Department at (970) 565-8441.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

of counterfeit bills were uncovered in less than a week<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,168,28,60,29,51],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-31109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-crime","tag-headlines","tag-montezuma-county","tag-newsletter","tag-police"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81316,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31109\/revisions\/81316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31109"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=31109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}