WESTMINSTER, Colo. – A pair of con artists ripped off a Girl Scout group when they exchanged a fake $100 bill for cookies, police said.

The unknown couple handed over the bill Friday night at a supermarket, telling the girls it had been washed when asked about why it looked so strange.

“It felt and looked wrong and it was a quarter of an inch shorted than a $1 bill,” said Jil Hennessey-Seabolt, the cookie director for Junior Girl Scouts Troop 2121. Hennessey-Seabolt said the Girl Scouts gave the couple $93.50 in change after the purchase.

The exchange eradicated the Scouts’ earnings that day. The money they raise in the sales goes to camping trips and to area charities.

The story does have a happy ending, though. A resident donated $100 to the Girl Scouts.

Man donates kidney to old friend after reuniting online

NEW YORK – Two grade-school friends who reconnected online after more than a decade are becoming more than bosom buddies – one is donating a kidney to his rediscovered pal.

“He’s giving me something not too many people would give,” Ricardo Manier, 21, said of his friend Karl Celestin. The transplant surgery is set for Tuesday, the Daily News of New York reported.

The two were close friends and classmates in Queens until Manier’s family moved to California, after his eighth-grade year. Manier has focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a kidney-scarring disease that often causes chronic kidney failure, according to the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health’s Medline Plus Web site.

Nonetheless, he was a premed student until June, when his kidneys virtually stopped working, he said. During his six-week hospitalization, Facebook served up Celestin’s name.

The two soon got together in New York.

“I put myself in his shoes,” Celestin said