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Counterfeiting With High Resolution Inkjets
Makarand writes "Thanks to the availability of low cost high quality inkjet printers, crooks
are now able to
produce currency indistinguishable from the real
banknotes, at least under dim lighting conditions like that in a bar or a nightclub.
The term "digifeiters" is being coined for counterfeiters that use
cheap high-resolution printers to produce fake currency. Unlike costly color xerographic copiers that come inbuilt with features
to detect security details on banknotes and stop currency copying, no cheap printers
come with such feature. An anti-digifeiting system for cheaper printers may consist of printer driver software capable of recognizing data patterns indicating currencies of several countries." I wonder what GimpPrint would think of being forced to print or not print certain documents based on their contents.
Was when they visited the photocopy place and tried to copy dollars, then tried to pay the copy guy with their printed money. Ahh, I miss that show.
Go for plastic bank notes like australia. They work well... They even have clear patches you can see right through.
Try counterfeiting those.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I'm surprised they can turn a profit, what with having to spend $80 to replace jammed ink cartridges every three minutes.
I mention this because this could be the next step for inkjets (if it hasn't been done already!) with all the privacy concerns that entails.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Other recent articles about counterfeiting have mentioned a proprietary chemical mixture that removes a vast majority of the ink from printed currency, yet leaves the security strip, watermark and colored fibres intact. Bills treated in this manner will fool those colored markers that most places uses for confirmation. You get a stack of $5s, 'bleach' them and reprint them as $10s and you've doubled your money, print them as $20s and you're up to 4x, print them as $100s and you're at 20x. If you take bills as part of your job, double check that the watermark image is the same as the face printed on the bill, and that the value in the security strip matches as well.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Not after you set the bills down on a bar that's wet due to drink spillage, etc. The other thing is that bartending is VERY fast paced, it would be easy to not notice.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Actually, it's a common practice for a counterfreiting operation to 'launder' its money before putting it out into circulation. They will literally put it in a washer / dryer to give it that 'worn down' look and feel.
At least with U.S. currency, there are more issues than just he appearence of the bill. A big one, for example, is the material. If you printed out a set of nice new bills on standard copier paper, nobody would believe for a second that it was a real bill, low lights or no. There have been counterfiters who have bleached out low value bills, such as ones, and printed higher values onto them, like twenties, but I'm not sure how well your average inkjet printer would feed the cottony paper used for bills.
I'm no currency expert, but I would imagine there are a lot of issues like this that aren't effected by the gross appearence of the bill for both U.S. and other bills.
Narrative
Last year, someone went into a convenience store in rural Michigan, and bought a candy bar. They paid for it with a $200 bill with George W Bush's face on it. The clerk gave the customer about $199.30 in change without a problem.
I think it was the manager who first raised the question about the validity of this bill later.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
which is why, here in the UK, we make higher denomination notes larger in size than those of a lesser denomination... I guess they didn't think of that in the USA.
Apparently 90% of US currency is outside of the US at any given time.
print it on glossy photo paper, not on cheapo recycled office paper.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They were xeroxing nickels.
The spent 25 cents for each xeroxed nickel.
After they got a bunch, they raggedly tore the extra paper from around their fake paper "nickels" and tried to buy candy from the clerk.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Sort of related: HP now offers invisible ink for inkjet printers viewable only under UV or IR light, intended to print stuff like tracking barcode on financial documents without customers noticing them (so shred all your junk mail, not just stuff with visible account numbers, since you don't know what might be printed invisibly on it). Maybe that's another way they can surreptitiously tag the output of color printers. Your printer specs say the inkjet print head has 48 dots? Have you ever actually counted them? Maybe they'll add an unannounced 49th dot that squirts invisible ink on the paper, and a tiny amount of invisible ink in a secret chamber of every cartridge. Yeah! That's the real reason the govt wants to extend the DMCA ban third-party inkjet refills, so they can keep tracing printer output back to its source! Tinfoil hat time... :)
From Anna's News Clippings
"A woman was charged $2.12 at a Diary Queen drive-through in Danville, Kentucky, and she was given $197.88 in change for her $200 bill. In case a clerk might not know that a $200 bill isn't legal tender, this taped-together bill was clearly marked as a 'moral reserve note' and featured George W. Bush's portrait. The White House picture on the bill's back has yard signs reading 'We like broccoli'and 'Rooms not for rent'. Police were notified as to the woman's presence shortly after she left. They do not consider the bill to be a counterfeit one."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The idea is to use a lower value note, say a one, then bleach the old ink off of it. Use your handy-dandy inkjet to print a twenty note on the paper that used to be a one. The one is well suited to false promotion because it doesn't have a florescent nylon strip that a bartender could positively verify the paper isn't a twenty.
Since all US notes are the same size, feel the same, and mostly look the same it's easy to fake. I know the French franc, prior to the Euro, used different sized paper for different values.
As a side note, if you've never seen the movie The Grifters there's a scene where John Cusack flashes a twenty at a bartender, asks for a beer, then pulls a slight-of-hand leaving a ten on the counter expecting the bartender to remember the twenty and give change as such.
I know folks in the US complain about the Monopoly-esque look of other currency, but it's a hell-of-a-lot tougher to copy, easier for the blind to judge denomination from size, and easier for visitors to manager. Put a dime in front of a visitor and ask him the worth of it. He can't. Nowhere does it say "ten cents" or "10 cents." It just say "One Dime."
Sorry for ranting.
This is a boring sig
To slow down counterfeit bills (about 1 in every 10,000 bills is a counterfeit). The US treasury will be releasing new bills this year. And every 7 years.
Having caught people using counterfeit bills from working in nightclubs and restaurants, it is starting to become a problem.
Here is a link:
new $20 dollar bills.
TruePunk | Games
Do they actually recognize that currency is being copied and prohibit the operation, or add watermark stuff like "void".
They copy the bills, but some do stuff to make the copied bills unusable, like make a perfect copy of a bill but make the entire page hot pink. The Ricoh printers we had at my last job did that. Other copiers make the copy, but insert a code number somewhere on the bill unbeknownst to the counterfeiter. When the bill makes its way to the Secret Service, they find the code, contact the company, and find out where that copier is located, which speeds up the investigation quite a bit. IIRC, a few years back they nailed some idiot Cornell students this way. Unfortunately I can't find the story on Google, and I don't quite remember where I heard it-- possibly from one of the Discovery Channel or History Channel documentaries concerning the U.S. Mint or the Secret Service or counterfeiting.
~Philly
..like, for instance, Norwegian ones (see http://www.norgesbank.no/english/notes_and_coins/n otes.html for more on those) which has real securitymeasures like holograms and 'mother of pearl'-effect on it. Good luck trying to copy or scan that, 'cuz it plain can't be done without very, very specialised equipment. In fact, a while back I wrote up a short piece on Norwgian money for one of my american friends who were comming over to visit, and since he wondered how they have apperantly managed to scan it at http://www.norgesbank.no/english/notes_and_coins/c ounterfeit200kr.html , I gave them a call and asked - and was told that that picture was made out of a "number of scans at various angles blended together". For some reason they didn't want to give me any more details on how to achive that efect...
Sorry for not giving proper links, but I seem to have misplaced my little 'cheat-note' on how to write that bit of code...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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It's just the US dollar that has been going down, and the others seem to be going up compared to US dollar.
Here, try comparing AU$ to CDN$. Neither is growing compared to the other.
Or, here's EURO compared to AU$.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
As for the technical aspects. Take a look at the "big head" notes. Their is microprinting on the lower left side of the portrait. This microprinting is so fine, that light reflecting off of them scatters making it impossible to make a clear copy. In addition, there is multi-colored ink on one of the 5/10/20/50/100 numbers in the corners. And there is that pesky watermark. Oh, and ink from inkjets runs like there is no tommorow. A sweatty person couldn't pass those notes.
All in all, the penalties for counterfitting and the risk of getting caught are too high.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Not the printing forged money is ok, but I don't want my printer "deciding" what to and not to print. What's next, printers "deciding" not to print documents they deem as anti-government? Or not printing images they deem as pornography?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
For several months, I worked in a bank cash vault (Fifth Third Bank, Toledo OH USA) and noted some things.
... but then again, in handling coin, I soon learned to listen to the distinctive sound of silver tinging against the cupro-nickel normal coinage in the sealed bags.
(There was one false alarm that turned out to be Eisenhower dollars.)
... I can only conclude that this is because that these are generally places where the lighting is more dim, lots of small transactions take place, and frankly, where the environment is busy and loud.
Counterfeit 20s (and some 10s) showed time and time again in their deposits.
(It was particularly amusing to contact the customer about the debit, since it seems some of them expect the bank to simply replace the bill with a real one.)
... of course, it was a washed out line and that more than anything told me it was counterfeit.
... bills go through a lot, and you can't just go by the hue.
I've seen bills that have been dyed ... light green, dark purple, things like that.
It happens.
Firstly, silver coinage is very much out there, even to the point that a handful of silver Kennedy half dollars can be found in a single deposit from a department store (there was even a Franklin half in one batch). Perhaps people just don't notice silver coinage even in high-volume retail
Secondly, fake twenty dollar (US$20) bills are being easily passed along in bars
It could also be that the criminal element that does the counterfeiting is native to the bar-going crowd.
I have inspected these fake 20s in some detail. I noted right off the bat the "obvious" difference: the overall hue of the bill is off just enough to be suspicious. It is a little darker, and either slightly more yellow, brown and even a tiny bit purple. So it is easy for me to believe that these bills can be passed off in a darker environment.
The texture of the bills was OK, surprisingly. It could be that the paper was run through a washing and/or brushing mechanism to more simulate the cloth-y feel of a real bill. As for the microprinting
P.S. A final note about hue
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I think that would make a great plot for a caper movie -- pulling off a big heist of real currency paper from Crane & Co.
I've recently started working in a restaurant, and as such handle a fair deal of cash. I have to say, I've never bothered to check currency to see if it's real. I know in some department stores it's required for the clerks to use a counterfeit-detecting pen on anything over $20, but this is certainly not the norm.
The problem is that you can do a fairly lousy job, especially if you're giving me a wad of various bills to pay for your dinner. (ie, if you give me a bunch of $5's and $1's, I'd just throw them all in the register, most likely not even looking at them one-by-one.)
Machines exist for 'counting' money (at extremely high rates) that automatically check various security features. Suppose cash registers started having an interface to this -- you'd stick the money in, and it would automatically undergo security checks.
By the way, am I the only one who isn't too convinced that the new bill styles will be effective? The old ones will still be accepted, and if they're easier to forge, why wouldn't I just forge one of those? Frequently changing their design won't really counter counterfeiting (heh, no pun intended there).
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suwain_2
"If you're a counterfeiter and you can't fool an iodine pen, you should consider going into another line of crime."
I would recommned congressman.