ATHENS, Ga. -- A man tried to rob an Athens woman when she refused to give him change for an obviously fake bill Sunday, the latest in a wave of counterfeit-money crimes in Athens.

The woman was doing her laundry when the man tried to snatch her purse; the day before, another man used $120 in bogus bills to pay for a mechanical Halloween figure at a roadside stand in Northern Clarke County, Athens-Clarke police said.

Whoever is circulating the money probably also is into drugs, prostitution, gambling and other illegal enterprises, because people who are duped into taking fake money won't complain to police, according to Detective Beverly Russell, an Athens-Clarke police financial crimes investigator.

Those people then spend the worthless money at convenience stores, bars and other retailers, she said.

A bystander at the Danielsville Road laundromat intervened when the victim screamed and refused to let go of her purse, police said.

But the other man with bogus bills got away with his Halloween statue - a hooded, talking executioner that swings an ax.

The seller, a vendor from Carnesville who keeps a stand at Commerce and Newton Bridge roads near the Jackson County line, was so busy with other customers he didn't realize the six $20 bills a customer gave him were fake until he counted his daily receipts later on.

"It felt like real money," Thomas Easter said Monday. "I wouldn't have taken it if it didn't."

The quality of the bills Easter took was better than much of the counterfeit money that has been showing up in Athens for more than a month, leading police to believe more than one source is circulating bogus bills.

The obvious forgeries are easy to spot, because they've been made with bond paper and an ink-jet color printer, Russell said. The hues are off, the images are fuzzy, and the colors tend to run, she said.

The bills passed off on Commerce Road apparently were actual cloth currency that a crook "washed" and replaced the denominations, Russell said.

The police have been investigating the counterfeiting with the U.S. Secret Service.

Although Russell and other local authorities have seen a spike in counterfeit money reports in the Athens area, Special Agent Mark Ritchie of the Secret Service's Atlanta office doesn't think it's out of the norm.

"It's no more prevalent in Athens than it is anywhere else," said Ritchie, who said the amount of counterfeit money circulating in the Atlanta metro area and elsewhere in the country remains fairly constant from year to year.

And it's not necessarily drug dealers who are responsible, he said.

"The sources could be a high school student banging out a few notes to an international source, so it could be anybody," Ritchie said.

To learn how to spot counterfeit bills, visit www.secretservice.gov or www.moneyfactory.gov.