A Lexus driver tried to dine and dash at Michael’s Bar and Grill in Manchester, Missouri. He tried to get away from the situation by handing the cashier a fake $1,000 bill to pay for a meal he just had.
However, the dine-and-dasher’s move backfired when the restaurant, located about 20 miles outside St. Louis, decided to piece together his image on the eatery’s Facebook handle after realizing a massive error had been made by the servers on Sunday.
Per First Alert 4, the customer reportedly ordered a big meal consisting of a burger and a lot of sides accompanying the main meal at the restaurant. The customer had first asked for a change from a $100 note. The bill was around $40.
As the server rushed to get the bill, she realized that the note handed to her was a novelty $1,000 bill. As she made her way back to confront the customer, the man had already left in his Lexus.
Here’s the fake $1000 bill a customer used for a dine & dash scam at Michael’s Bar & Grill on Manchester. The restaurant posted surveillance photos of him on Facebook to shame him. He stopped in the next day to apologize & pay the bill with a tip. @KMOV pic.twitter.com/BzlkSbur2R
— Russell Kinsaul (@russellkinsaul) October 15, 2025
The bill was labeled as “ancestor money.” For those who are not familiar with the term, ancestor money, in Chinese tradition, is burned to serve the spirits, ensuring money for material goods in the afterlife.
This isn’t the first time that a diner has made an attempt to run away after eating a meal for free at Michael’s Bar and Grill. Kristina Moriarty, from the eatery, revealed, “Unfortunately, it’s happened quite a few times lately.”
The go-to solution to dealing with such issues, per Moriarty, is to post photos of freeloaders on Facebook. The restaurant has been trying out this method for a while now. “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,” Kristina Moriarty said.
Dawn Lamb, who works as a bartender at the restaurant, complained about the incident, saying, “We work for our tips, and this affects us. The profit margins are too small for this to keep happening.”
“Here’s the thing, if you do this, we are going to expose you, and we’re going to make it aware. So we can again prevent this from happening,” Lamb added, explaining how the concept has been a bit helpful.
So what happened next? Well, seems like the Facebook strategy of calling our the dine-and-dasher on social media, worked. The customer, who once thought of getting away by paying a counterfeit note, appeared to have saw the post on the platform, returned to the restaurant within a window of a few days, and then apologized. In addition to that, the aforementioned customer also settled his bill, and even left a tip for the server.
As of now, the Facebook post featuring the dine-and-dasher seems to have been deleted by the eatery’s official social media handle.
