How to spot a fake 100b note

Something I am relatively proficient at after my weekend in La Paz - although I still returned to Cochabamba with two of them - is spotting fake 100 boliviano notes. I certainly won't fall for it again... in the words of George Bush, "Fool me once..."







Here's what a real one looks like...

And here's what a fake one looks like...

Differences?....


I actually got one of them out of an ATM... not much you can do about that, but the second one should have been easy to avoid. I asked a taxi driver if he had change for 100, of course he did... just long enough to swap my note with one of his fakes, hand it back and then re-inform me that he actually didn't have the change after all.

Sounds pretty schoolboy in hindsight, but the moral of the story is you have to show them that you're checking your note before you hand over, and make sure you check the one you get back.