The workers in Arkansas understand why its essential to have a counterfeit pen. One night club owner had stacks of $100 bills that were counterfeit that had to come out of his own pocket and could have been avoided if he had a counterfeit detector. The workers at Valero gas station are also reporting counterfeit bills and keep a counterfeit pen by the register to avoid ending up with funny money.

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Gas stations and other businesses should watch carefully because the money they accept may be worthless.

Every bill taken at the Valero gas station on Kanis and Rodney Parham is marked with a counterfeit detection pen because they’ve received funny money.

“We did the same thing,” say Steve Side who once owned a night club, so he understands. “We mostly got hundreds dollar bills,” he continues. “You get some of them that were really good. And some of them were really bad.”

Over time, Sides says the phony money continued to accumulate. “I had a stack of those hundred dollar bills probably five or six inches high that I had to turn over to the Secret Service. And those were hundred dollar bills and that’s just money out of my pocket.”

Brian Mar with the Secret Service says there’s always been counterfeit bills in circulation, but with the rise in food and gas prices, places like the Valero that deal with high volumes of cash, are susceptible to the counterfeiters. “Some of this currency is seized prior to being passed to the public and some of this currency is passed to the public,” Mar says. “What you see here is currency that has been passed to the public.”

It’s thousands and thousands of dollars that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. But Mars says there are ways to protect yourself from being defrauded. “Genuine currency and counterfeit currency is very easy to tell apart if you’ll just take the time to look at it,” he explains. “There’s red and blue security fibers woven into the note itself in genuine currency.”

Mar says your eyes are the best counterfeit detector. “If you’re using the detection pen, go ahead and use it. But I would also make sure that I go ahead and check it against a genuine note.”

Or you can take the fake and lose like Steve Sides once did. “It’s just paper,” he says. “It’s not any good for anything.”

If you come across some of this counterfeit currency, Agent Mar says you should contact your police department for quickest response.

Worldwide, he says $765 billion in U.S. currency is in circulation and more than $100,000 of counterfeit cash has been identified in Arkansas.