The notes shown below are what the eBay seller calls “Chinese Training Notes”. While I do have a couple of training notes in my collection as examples, I tend to stay away from them. It is hard to prove if it is a training note or a good copy of one. Training notes are used by banks to familiarize their employees of a recent design change of a currency they handle. The training notes are usually very good likenesses (but never as sharp and clear as genuine notes) of the new bill except security features are missing, paper is usually not bank note paper, and there is clear and obvious markings on all printed sides so it is impossible to confuse them with genuine notes.

These notes sold on eBay peeked my curiosity and after a number of emails, I bought a set. I was expecting novelty grade notes. His feedback was less than stellar, many because people had complained about the ‘training’ notes being cheap fakes. (Note: A training note IS by design a cheap fake.)

The U.S. BEP, and many other countries have strict laws on reproduction of their currency. Sometimes it involves the resolution, color, size, or a host of other considerations. These training notes sold on eBay are the correct size, color is very close, printing is better than average novelty notes (IMO). Whoever is making these (I believe) are on the illegal side of any grey area of the law. These could easily pass as genuine if a person passed these in a stack of real notes OR used ink remover to remove the red stamps. They are still missing a number of things such as serial numbers, but people really just glance at money and if it looks close enough then they take it. It happens every day.

I am going to set these aside and research these more before they get into my collection. I am not familiar enough with these types of notes to make a good opinion on them.

What do you think about these?

HINT: Here is a message I get when trying to scan these. (I will use the eBay scan for you to see the notes here in this post, since my scanner refuses to scan them.)