The government said it had more security features than previous notes to make it “easier for machines to read” and “more convenient for the public to distinguish authentic notes from fake ones”.

Read more: China rolls out new 100 yuan banknotes, with stronger anti-forgery features

However, some banks’ automatic teller machines (ATMs) would not accept the new money when people tried to deposit it, reported the East Asia Economic and Trade News in the northeastern city of Changchun.

A bank executive said it would take several days for all ATMs to be “upgraded” to recognise the new note, it said.

Residents also complained that supermarkets had been rejecting the new bills as counterfeit detection machines consistently sounded alarms when presented with the note, the paper said.

“Come back another day if you want to spend it – we dare not to take the note before the verifier gives the nod,” the report cited a supermarket employee as saying.

Counterfeiting is rampant in China with the country’s own currency no exception, despite numerous crackdowns by authorities.

Police in the southern province of Guangdong announced in September that they had seized piles of forged 100-yuan banknotes with a face value of 210 million yuan in a raid, according to reports.

Money-counting machines are ubiquitous in Chinese shops, where customers making large purchases in cash need to use wads of notes to pay.

The government had intentionally kept the denomination of Chinese legal tender low to “curb both counterfeiting and corruption”, the Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.