Funny money leads to serious charges for two Aberdeen women

MONROE COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – Some funny money has two Aberdeen women facing serious charges.

The women are being charged with one count False Pretenses and one count Forgery.

Law enforcement say the women spent a couple hundred dollars of that money at restaurants on Friday, before they were caught.

Tyneisha Cole, 25, and Marquita Thompson, 24, are accused of financing their weekend outing with fake cash.

“They passed this at a hamburger place, here in Aberdeen, and also a restaurant down at, Tag’s in Hamilton, and also in another couple of businesses,” said Monroe County Sheriff Cecil Cantrell.

Aberdeen Assistant Police Chief Quinell Shumpert said the women were caught with about $5,000 worth of prop money they ordered online from Amazon.

Shumpert says it’s not rare for fake money to pop up from time to time, but several thousand dollars at a time is rare.

“That much, yeah. Usually, they’ll just do a couple of hundred dollars, or fifty, or something. Most of the time, they’ll just copy one on the copying machine, cut it out, and then go do it. This female said she ordered it to do a photo shoot.”

These red Chinese symbols might make you wonder how anyone could mistake these for real bills, but Sheriff Cecil Cantrell says these women knew what they were doing.

“They hold their finger over all of the writing and then, they get them talking about something else, and then the next thing they know, they’ve done given them the money, the change for the money.”

And at that point, it’s too late to get it back.

“If you take that money and you give them good money for that bad money, then you’re really out of luck. All you can do is try to remember who they are and go sign papers. It’s going to be, you know, bad for you, you know, you to lose your money because basically, the judge will order restitution, but that’s going to take a while.”

That’s why the sheriff is wanting businesses to be aware of who they’re doing business with and to check all the bills they’re handling, Not just the big ones like 50’s and 100’s because fake cash comes in all sizes.

“It’s out there and if you take it and so forth, then you’re just giving your money away by giving them change. That’s all they’re after is just, they’re laundering money to get, taking bad money to make good money out of it.”

If the women are convicted, they face between five to ten years behind bars.

The sheriff’s department is also reaching out to the Federal Government in this case because of the large amount of fake money.