Man arrested at Best Buy for paying in $2 bills

So this article is 7 YEARS OLD.

Strange....

Current events forum????


Er..... Yeah...oookaaaaaaayyy

Commenting on the incident, Baltimore County police spokesman Bill Toohey told the Sun: “It’s a sign that we’re all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world.”

That was over 10 years ago and what has that to do with terrorism anyway? Its like the excuse when you ran out of excuses. I would worry more about powerful drug cartels south of the border.

Originally posted by ANNED
never mind the store clerks you find moron clerks all the time

but who was the moron cop who arrested the guy that did not know $2 were legal tender.

If this was what they have for LEOs there god help them.

YES! THIS!!!

A Best Buy clerk not knowing about $2 bills doesn't shock me at all, it's that the cops arrested the guy. And isn't there a single educated bystander? If that had been going down in front of me, I'd have been laughing my ass off at all of them!

reply to post by ReadyPower


So, no one bothered to call his bank, or ANY bank, where the employees would have told them they were idiots for not knowing that $2 bills are legit. Nope, just arrest him because a BEST BUY employee says so? Bad move on the part of those cops (and I sincerely hope they are included in his lawsuit, that I really hope he files!), and yet another reason to NEVER shop at that store. This is beyond insane.

Originally posted by DrumsRfun
I see this story differently than most of you guys here.

The guy "protests" paying a bill??
(for services rendered for installing a car stereo)


To me he was acting like an arsehole and got treated like one.
Of course it was questioned if the bills were real....who the hell pays a 114$ bill with 2$ bills??
The ink smears would have made me wonder too.

The customer is NOT always right and this guy wanted to ruffle some feathers and got ruffled himself instead.
Looks good on him.

Paying for a 6 dollar item with 2$ bills I can understand,this guy wanted attention and got it......I see why the red flags went up.
The guy is a douche.

Next time he should just pay the bill for the work done and shut his mouth and quit "protesting"

edit on 21-8-2012 by DrumsRfun because: (no reason given)

I guess you overlooked the part where he wasn't supposed to be charged for it but worst buy charged him anyway. I don't blame him I would have paid for it in loose pennies.

After Best Buy personnel reportedly told Bolesta he would not be charged for the installation of a stereo in his son’s car, he received a call from the store saying it was in fact charging him the fee. As a means of protest, Bolesta decided to pay the $114 bill using 57 crisp, new $2 bills.

i thought this was a joke till i started to read the thread it is in the uk i am of to ebay now i want one goto have one

$2 bills are rare, but they are out there. We got a few in change when we went to the Train Museum in Lancaster PA. We kept them. I'm sure a lot of people keep them when they get a hold of them. But to not know that $2 bills are real and are legal tender ... that's IGNORANT.

Originally posted by DrumsRfun
I see this story differently than most of you guys here.

The guy "protests" paying a bill??
(for services rendered for installing a car stereo)


To me he was acting like an arsehole and got treated like one.
Of course it was questioned if the bills were real....who the hell pays a 114$ bill with 2$ bills??
The ink smears would have made me wonder too.

The customer is NOT always right and this guy wanted to ruffle some feathers and got ruffled himself instead.
Looks good on him.

Paying for a 6 dollar item with 2$ bills I can understand,this guy wanted attention and got it......I see why the red flags went up.
The guy is a douche.

Next time he should just pay the bill for the work done and shut his mouth and quit "protesting"

edit on 21-8-2012 by DrumsRfun because: (no reason given)

I was a retail store manager for many years and encountered alot of rude customers but we always treated them with respect and intent to solve the problem so that they left happy. If it weren't for their business Best Buy wouldn't even be there.

We took many $2 bills. It was irritating because it messed up the deposit at the end of the night but we knew it was legal tender. How ignorant of them not to know that!

I worry about the next generation becoming more stupid than the last. Anyone see the movie 'Idiocracy'? Luke Wilson wakes up in a time capsule and finds out the future generation has become so dumb they use Gatorade instead of water to feed the plants because it has 'electrolytes'.

reply to post by buster2010


Nope...I didn't miss that part at all and read the same article as the rest of you guys and gals.
I just have a different opinion than you guys.
I see the guy as a jerk.

Originally posted by FlyersFan
$2 bills are rare, but they are out there. We got a few in change when we went to the Train Museum in Lancaster PA. We kept them. I'm sure a lot of people keep them when they get a hold of them. But to not know that $2 bills are real and are legal tender ... that's IGNORANT.

No 2 dollar bills really aren't rare. You can get them at your local banks some banks don't stock them so you may have to call around to find them.

once freed he has the right to sue this poor example of a police station ...

then demand his payment be paid in 2 dollar bills

I think that the age of this article is irrelevent. The stupidity displayed by all involved is monumental. As Ron White says "You can't fix stupid". The fact that the serial numbers are sequential should have been a give away.

The fact that this escalated to the point that the guy was arrested is a demonstration of just how ignorant the population has become.This is clearly a case of false arrest. Seriously, they had to call the secret service to validate the currency. Even the cops are this ignorant of the currency in their own country.

There is no hope for us.

As for the store charging for a service that the customer was told he would not be charged for is just the old corporate bait and switch.

Originally posted by Xtrozero
Holy crap...you can't pay with 2 dollar bills...everyone knows that, because someone just might need to do some mental math.... The police should have shot him...

Yea but first they should have tazed him, do some shouting, taze him again and then shoot him an unnecessary amount of times. Then claim they thought suspect had a gun.

It seems to me the problem initially was that the cashier didn't want to accept the money, not that it was thought the money was fake; that came later. I can sympathize with the cashier some. Cash registers have no place for money for a $2 bill or anything above $20 (at least with the register that I use to man.) Whenever we got a "uncommon" bill, we would just stick it under the tray. This would be infeasible though with 57 bills. I probably would have been like "the junk" myself in that situation.

That said, the money is legal tender and they have to accept it regardless. I can only facepalm for those that came later and asked if the money was real.

Originally posted by octotom
It seems to me the problem initially was that the cashier didn't want to accept the money, not that it was thought the money was fake; that came later. I can sympathize with the cashier some. Cash registers have no place for money for a $2 bill or anything above $20 (at least with the register that I use to man.) Whenever we got a "uncommon" bill, we would just stick it under the tray. This would be infeasible though with 57 bills. I probably would have been like "the junk" myself in that situation.

That said, the money is legal tender and they have to accept it regardless. I can only facepalm for those that came later and asked if the money was real.

If that's the case then all they had to do was rubberband them together, write the register number on a piece of paper to slip under the band and place it in the safe to be counted at night. For those cashiers who can't leave their register just call a manager to take the bills.

I find it odd that the everyone seems to think the clerk did not know $2 bills exist. That is clearly not the case if you read the article. The problem was, their was a large pile of them, newly printed, in sequential order, with smeared ink. The fact they were $2 bills has nothing to do with the story other than the guy trying to be a smart ass with a clerk who has nothing to do with if he had to pay a fee or not. Not only is it very old but, the $2 bill angle has nothing to with it. If he had payed with $1 bills and had a pile of them, newly printed, in sequential order, with smeared ink the same event would have occured. All these coments about how stupid someone is and no on has bother to read the article. Ironic that.

I am not a big lawsuit type of person. I think most are frivolous.

But I would say sue both best buy and the local police department.

I want to hit my head against the wall.

Um… who would counterfeit a $2.00 bill anyways? If I was gonna make some fake money, I sure wouldn’t invest my time and energy in making a $2.00 bill. And no one who is purposely using fake money would keep them in sequential order.

You lose more than $50 bucks a day on bad checks and fraudulent credit cards.

This whole thing is just retarded.

Thanks,
Blend57

reply to post by MrSpad


Exactly!!
Do people really think a cashier doesn't know what a 2 dollar bill looks like??
I replied to this thread my unpopular opinion on page 2 to help people cut through the BS.

I would have a red flag as well with 57 2$ bills with some smears.
Add him acting like a jackass and you get another variable to this story.

Originally posted by cavtrooper7
Hats off to the Mensa graduate employees for making to world safe for people of limited perception.

There's a reason they work at Best Buy