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‘I really had my hopes up’: DoorDash driver sees $100 tip waiting. Then they flip it over

‘Report them to the police for paying with a counterfeit bill.’

Photo of Lindsey Weedston

Lindsey Weedston

A $100 bill with text overlay that reads 'This would instantly radicalize me.'

A DoorDash driver on Reddit says they were offered a tip on a delivery that looked like a $100 bill but was in fact a Trump ad. According to their post on r/mildlyinfuriating, a note left by the customer said there would be a cash tip by the door. The driver had their hopes up as they went to pick it up, but found “Trump won 2024” printed on the back.

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This would appear to be a crueler version of the same trick that leaves advertisements for Jesus disguised as $20 bills for restaurant wait staff. Commenters were more than mildly infuriated at this one.

The $100 Trump ad

The post, which gained over 74,000 upvotes in less than a day, shows two photos—one of each side of the “tip.” The front looks exactly like a crisp $100 bill, complete with Ben’s disapproving face. The back, however, looks like a MAGA bumper sticker.

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Reddit comment reading 'I delivery for door dash. The customer left this piece of paper as a tip. One side of it looks like a clearly fake $100 bill. The other side of it says Trump won.'
u/Mysterious_Check_983 via Reddit

“The customer left this piece of paper as a tip,” said Redditor u/Mysterious_Check_983 in a comment. “One side of it looks like a clearly fake $100 bill. The other side of it says Trump won.”

A fake $100 resting on a car seat.
u/Mysterious_Check_983 via Reddit
Photo of a small ad reading 'Trump won 2024.'
u/Mysterious_Check_983 via Reddit
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The message is apparently meant to either rub the right-wing win into choice faces or to counter a fringe liberal conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump and his allies rigged the 2024 election. Not long after Election Day, some Kamala Harris supporters started making noise about “missing votes,” though fewer people voted in 2024 than in 2020.

In the following weeks, this morphed into a theory that Elon Musk used Starlink to hack voting machines. Some conspiracy theorists claimed the satellites were uploaded with fake Trump votes, then exploded to cover the evidence. Voting machines are not connected to the internet, so it is unclear how they would do that. Election security experts resoundingly dismissed the theories, and no evidence ever surfaced to support them.

Regardless, the 2024 election truthers remained pervasive enough to make someone money on these fake $100 bills. You can get a 100-pack of them on Amazon for $12.99.

Fake tips plague tipped workers across the U.S.

Tipping has become a contentious issue in the U.S., where every business seems to have a tip jar these days. But worse than the dreaded rotating tablet tip screen is the horror of getting a prank instead of money after delivering the goods.

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For many years now, people have left fake cash for tipped workers at restaurants. Before President Trump, this typically came in the form of church pamphlets telling wait staff that eternal salvation is worth way more than the $20 they thought they were getting. This little trick made the news after it happened to X user @lightbodyblues in late 2015.

Tweet with photos of a church pamphlet disguised as a $20 with text reading 'someone seriously left this as my tip today. pissed is an understatement. i was so excited when i saw $20'
@lightbodyblues/X

Still, at least the Christians who did this arguably had good intentions. The Trump 2024 ad seems to come from a hope that one’s delivery driver is liberal just to rub salt in a wound.

‘This would instantly radicalize me’

Some commenters on the Reddit post wondered if the prank would have an impact that the customer wouldn’t expect. Met with the cruelty of this Trump supporter, wouldn’t a struggling DoorDash driver feel repelled from their side?

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Reddit comment reading 'This would instantly radicalize me.'
u/loganlofi via Reddit

“This would instantly radicalize me,” says u/loganlofi.

“I wonder how a fellow Trumper would react,” mused u/Low_Pickle_112. “I’m guessing that OP isn’t a Trump supporter, but if you’re giving these things out, there’s a chance you annoy someone who disagrees with you but there’s also a chance you annoy someone who does agree with you, basically telling them “See, we’re dicks to each other too!” Guess these people just don’t consider that.”

Reddit comment reading 'I wonder how a fellow Trumper would react. I'm guessing that OP isn't a Trump supporter, but if you're giving these things out, there's a chance you annoy someone who disagrees with you but there's also a chance you annoy someone who does agree with you, basically telling them 'See, we're dicks to each other too!' Guess these people just don't consider that.'
u/Low_Pickle_112 via Reddit
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Others recommended that the OP consider taking action. Some said they should report the customer to the app so that they couldn’t use DoorDash anymore. Other Reddit users suggested calling the cops and reporting them for dealing in counterfeit cash.

“They have proof that the fake bill was presented as an actual cash tip,” u/MarkHirsbrunner writes. “Report them to the police for paying with a counterfeit bill.”

Reddit comment reading 'They have proof that the fake bill was presented as an actual cash tip. Report them to the police for paying with a counterfeit bill.'
u/MarkHirsbrunner via Reddit

Of course, since the customer used it as an optional tip, this probably wouldn’t work.

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A final group of Redditors simply wondered why anyone would do this, and one user had an equally simple answer.

Reddit comment reading 'So that they can hurt people. It's that simple.'
u/MarkHirsbrunner via Reddit

“So that they can hurt people,” said u/Perfessor_Deviant.

The Daily Dot has reached out to u/Mysterious_Check_983 for comment via Reddit.

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