Atlanta woman tries to fool Walmart with a fake $1M bill, offers the lamest reason when she is obviously caught

A woman walked into a Walmart with gift cards and three separate bills of counterfeit $1 million notes.

Back in 2004, NBC reported that a woman named Alice Regina Pike racked up a $1,675 bill at the national retailer’s Covington, Ga., branch. She first tried to pay using the gift cards, but when that wouldn’t do, she just pulled out a $1 million note. Of course, the bill was counterfeit, and most people could probably deduce that no such bill exists, but after Pike was arrested, she insisted the bill was real, and questioning its authenticity was not possible since “you can’t keep up with the U.S. Treasury.” Well, she might have predicted what 2025 and the future is set to look like.

Pike’s gift cards reportedly only held a total of $2.32. It also raises the question of whether she genuinely expected the Wal-Mart cashier to hand her change from her $1 million note — in cash. Apparently, Pike got the fake from her estranged husband, who is a collector. Pike was insistent she was never actually trying to pass off the bill as real — but reports from NBC say she did, in fact, ask for change.

There’s never been a $1 million bill printed in U.S. history. The highest denomination ever printed was the $100,000 note, issued between 1934 and 1935, bearing the picture of President Woodrow Wilson. That note, however, was never available to the public. The $1 million bill is purely a modern novelty, usually printed as a prop for content. The idea that someone might think it’s real would be unthinkable — but we live in a society where Hawk Tuah convinced people to invest their life savings in her memecoin, so anything is truly possible in the contemporary financial world. Hawk Tuah has since come forward to claim she was also a victim, insisting she had no idea what the people who got her into the crypto business were planning in the long term.

Meanwhile, the U.S. credit score keeps sliding lower, and the Donald Trump megabill continues to balloon the national deficit. You’d hope the average citizen would at least know what the highest dollar denomination actually is. Yet there’s still another case: Daily Mail reported that a 53-year-old man named Michael Fuller also tried to use the mythical $1 million note at a Walmart. He attempted to buy $476 worth of goods, including a microwave and an oven, in Lexington, North Carolina. Police were called, and Fuller was promptly arrested.

Pop culture has long played with the fantasy of stumbling on a bank error or finding a note never released to the public. To be fair, those rare $100,000 notes are still held by collectors to this day, often fetching far more than face value. That elusive $1 million number might not even be out of the question — after all, people pay millions for a banana duct-taped to a wall.