A Missouri restaurant got even with a dine-and-dasher who scammed them out of a meal by paying with a fake bill when they plastered the thieving customer’s face on social media.
The customer ordered a burger and multiple sides at Michael’s Bar and Grill in Manchester — about 20 miles outside St. Louis — before paying his tab with what his server believed was a $100 bill for a $40 meal, First Alert 4 reported.
When the busy server went to fetch his change, she realized the bill was fake — a novelty $1,000 bill. By the time she returned to confront him, the man had already left with a to-go bag of food and driven off in his Lexus.
The bill turned out to be “ancestor money,” a symbolic currency in Chinese tradition that is burned during rituals to ensure ancestors have the means to enjoy material possessions in the afterlife, according to the outlet.
Workers at the 46-year-old restaurant said there’s been a spike in people dining-and-dashing in recent months — and they’ve had enough.
“Unfortunately, it’s happened quite a few times lately,” server Kristina Moriarty told the outlet.
“We have cameras everywhere. We have license plate readers, we have facial recognition that we had to invest in because unfortunately, these things keep happening to small businesses around here.”
But knowing more needed to be done and in hopes of deterring further thefts, the restaurant has started posting the images of the tab skippers on its Facebook page.
“Here’s the thing, if you do this, we are going to expose you, and we’re going to make it aware. So we again can prevent this from happening,” bartender Dawn Lamb told the outlet.
Employees of the establishment said that after they posted a picture of the man who paid with the fake $1,000 bill, the shame of his image and crime being put on blast for the world to see actually appeared to have worked.
Michael’s said the fraudsters who passed off the fake bill must have seen he spotted his picture online and showed up the next day, paid his bill, apologized for what he had done, and even left the servers a tip, ashamed of his actions.
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