The former, it was a busy bar and no gadgets were used, unfortunately. I guess these days things have moved on somewhat and perhaps it would’ve been spotted sooner.
Just goes to show though, it’s not as easy as just saying “ah yes, a fake note”
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Absolutely. I once got £20 out of a cash machine, paid at a bar and got told it was fake and they kept it. I eventually got it back but they were convincing enough to be released from a cash machine.
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I can imagine environments like this are probably prime targets for trying to pass off fakes 
Sorry to hear you got caught out like, though can absolutely understand it.
When I worked retail it wasn’t that busy a place, so we had more time to check over notes without pressure. Can’t remember how many times I declined to take an apparent fake (if ever), though do remember the care and attention and fear of the one time I legitimately* took a £50 note! More likely for staff to get bamboozled by short change artists than anything else.
*Transaction value was near enough £50 that they got next to no change, we were encouraged to refuse them otherwise
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I’ve just had to use cash to pay for parking 
luckily I picked some up, must of known. The meter takes card but it kept saying my card was moving during the transaction. My phone was on the reader not moving so it’s obviously one of them terminals which just cries.
Could of used an app but that would have meant downloading the one relevant to the car park, create an account, add registration, add card details. All for a car park which I’ll more than likely never visit again 
If the contactless would have worked correctly without it sulking then I’d of used that. Didn’t pick up a card to bring with me.
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Yup fake notes are very much still in circulation and they probably work best with people who assume they would be super easy to spot.
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And likely pay an admin fee on top of the parking fee for your trouble. One advantage of using an app, though, is the ability to extend the parking time if you get held up.
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Yeah looking at the website for that location it’s a 16p convenience fee, convenient for the provider not the customer 
oh and if you ask for a text, 20p charge.
I’d paid for up to the maximum stay and left an hour before the car park then becomes free for the evening. Only lost out on about 50p doing it that way.
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Back when I worked in retail, many years ago, we had a pen (more like a highlighter) that you could simply draw over a note to see if it was fake or not.
No mark meant it was legit, if a black line appeared it was fake.
I wonder if these are still an accurate way of testing now or there are ways around it 
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I doubt they work in the same way on polymer notes.
Careful examination by touch and eye under a UV bulb should be all that’s needed.
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I’ve seen ones with a wax like substance to fool the pen test, but they are going obsolete with the new notes.
Had a look at the ones Ryman’s sell, and it says they work on polymer notes.
If you’ve got a good enough memory for all the security features built in to the notes themselves, checking them all should provide a good enough confidence level for most use:
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I think it’s a mistake on Rymen’s website, if you search the barcode this page from the manufacturer comes up and says only starch notes.
Raised print is also a good one to feel for.
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I should’ve known better than to trust the website of a company trying to sell things. Suggests they’re quite happy to fib about the ability of their products to do things just so they can take your money 
I wonder if Ryman might argue “We said it was ‘suitable for use’, meaning it doesn’t damage the notes. We didn’t say it would actually work to detect forged ones!” 
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This comes from a Which? survey.
Makes me wonder if this is 1 in 4 Which? readers or 1 in 4 from a more representative sample?
Can’t find the original survey report on Which? website. Does anyone know where it is located?
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I saw this the other day on the Which website. Doesn’t seem to give any more detail about how survey participants were chosen sadly.
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This paragraph doesn’t make a lot of sense;
Meanwhile one in five (20%) people who don’t regularly use cash said they would start using it if the cost of living crisis gets worse.
People who don’t regularly use cash are already using it, so they can’t start using it.
I regularly use cash (about £3 per week), so I can’t suddenly start using it.
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I took it to mean “people who only use it very rarely might start using it more”.
I haven’t taken cash out in c. three years (but I have used it before in my life) so if I took some out now I might consider it a “start to using cash regularly”
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I’m not sure what the link between cost of living crisis and using cash would be anyway… it’s a line of thinking that doesn’t make sense to me - if I have cash on me I’m more likely to spend it (one of the reasons I got out of the habit of carrying it in the first place, years ago, which worked well when card was less accepted and minimum charges were more common… these days if I was that short I’d have to leave both the cards and the phone at home to regulate myself!).
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I think using cash is a reasonable budgeting tool. Before app-based instant transaction information and balance updates were a thing I resisted switching to card-based spending because I found it so easy to lose track of how much I had spent on a card, particularly over the weekend.
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