Counterfeit bills are circulating around campus.

Since last September, nine instances of counterfeit bills have been reported,said NIU Police Sgt. Alan Smith said. The bills are of low denominations, like $5, $10 and $20, he said. The investigations behind counterfeit bills are pending because the bills have multiple sets of fingerprints on them.

Food Services Director Karen Villano said the Holmes Student Center accounting department has caught fake bills within the past month. Villano said finding these bills is strange because counterfeit bills are usually of a larger denomination.

While the accounting department is able to catch counterfeit bills, cashiers have a hard time noticing them because they are printed in a variety of designs, Villano said.

“How do you differentiate when you’re in a hurry?” she said.

Though the counterfeit bills are not affecting sales for businesses, they are frustrating to find, she said. Cashiers working at the Huskies Hub, the Coffee Corner and the DuSable Dugout must now check every kind of bill. Either a special marker is used to verify the authenticity of the paper, or the bill is inspected through a light for watermarks or security strips.

Christian Sandoval, a barista for the Coffee Corner, said he worked at the coffee shop for two years and never noticed fake bills of low denominations before.

“We weren’t careful because they were smaller bills,” Sandoval said.

Juston Sedacki, manager of the DuSable Dugout, said a fake $5 bill was found on Feb. 20 but he has not noticed other fake bills. He said he only inspects bills worth $20 or more.

There have 27 counterfeit bills found in DeKalb since last November,said DeKalb Police Lt. Gary Spangler. The majority of the bills have been $10, but two of the bills were $5, he said. A few were $20 and $100. Spangler said he was not aware of any connection between the fake bills used in DeKalb and the ones used at NIU.

Spangler said counterfeiters usually wash the ink off a $5 bill and print $20 on it. The security strip can be a reliable indicator of a bill’s authenticity. However, detecting counterfeit bills is not always easy, he said.

“There is no one thing that you can do to safeguard yourself,” Spangler said. “It could be looks, it could be color; it could be a combination of everything.”

Careful investigation is also needed to differentiate people who accidentally found counterfeit bills from those who intentionally use them, he said. Each case is still pending and requires unique methods of investigation.

Of the $759 billion held in U.S. currency outside the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve at the end of 2005, the U.S. Secret Service reported about $61 million was counterfeit worldwide and $56.2 million was counterfeit in the U.S., according to a 2010 policy discussion paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.