Forgery of £1 Notes.

Manawatu Herald, 12 June 1894, Page 3

Forgery of £1 Notes.

A remarkably clever forgery of the £1 notes of the Commercial Bank, Melbourne, has been discovered. The notes are splendid imitations, and no better testimony to this fact can be given than that furnished by the tellers of various Banks, who have passed them as genuine and sent them along to the clearing houses. The fraud was discovered in a peculiar way. A clerk from the Victorian Sports Depot in Elizabeth street, opposite the General Post Office, took one of the notes to the Bank yesterday and tendered it to the teller to be cashed across the counter. As he did so he remarked that "he did not like the looks of it somehow," and had in consequence brought it to be cashed. The teller looked at it, and ib was on the face of ib so obviously correct that, without much examination, he handed over the cash tor it, and placed it with the large bundles of notes behind the counter. Later, however, thirty-six other notes, crisp, bright, and similarly signed, tm^d up tlu'ough the clearinghouses,

The peculiarity of this circumstance, in conjunction with the remark of the clerk of the Victorian Sports Depot when cashing the note earlier in the morning, hastened the discovery, which doubtless would have been made during the day. The notes are not written or photographed, as is usual with bogus notes, they are lithographed, and the slight alteration of size and the compression of the letters seem to show that the work is that of a particularly clever workman, who made his block to suit the size of some genuine bank note papar, which he had in some way obtained.