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rrwood writes "This is an intriguing insight into the activities of a master Canadian counterfeiter. The subject of the article, Wesley Weber, is/was a distinguished hacker and cracker who used a combination of technological skills and social engineering to produce what is probably the highest-quality counterfeit currency ever detected in Canada. Even more interesting to note is the widescale effect this one guy had, since he and his confederates single-handedly managed to force businesses to stop accepting $100CDN bills, thus affecting literally millions of people. The story is a fascinating look at his brief career, and the dumb, shortsighted mistakes ultimately responsible for his downfall."
This is sorta irrelavent now, because recently the Canadian mint has come out with several new bills which are extremely difficult to counterfeit. THe new $20 bill came out last week I believe, and we've had new $100, $10 and $5 bills for ages now.
Hi there
I was under the impression that doing so at least in the US was illegal, until I actually (gasp!) googled it to make sure I was.
First link was to the US Treasury Department's FAQ on just that subject: Legal Tender Status.
I always thought it was illegal to refuse currency, but that nobody enforced it. Learn something every day. Honestly- it should be illegal for businesses to refuse currency; I don't care about the inconvenience of them having to change a $50 or $100 bill; if it's all I've got and I need gas, food, or lodging, well, they should have to accept it. It's very easy for it to be an issue of safety, and absurd to have money in your pocket in the industrialized world and not be able to use it. Nevermind that it should not be compulsory to use plastic.
Please help metamoderate.
For all the "har har i'm so funny lets bash canadians" comments out there, it should be noted that recently the Canadian dollar has actually been going up, rather then doing poorly like a certain someone's currency.
Hi there
Because people other than the government can take away your rights. If you were Canadian this guy would be making your dollar worth less, making you unable to spend your $100 bills, and making it more likely that you've been paid with phoney baloney.
I don't dare call it "stealing" because the "copyright violation is not theft" crowd will probably jump all over me. But whatever you want to call it, it's just as bad and it is a violation of your rights.
... seems like a bit of a sensational exageration. The $100 is hardly missed. I've only had a small handful over the years. Even $50s aren't that widespread. I see those a few times a month when I get larger quantities from the bank, but $20s are still the most common for even withdrawals of several hundred dollars. Maybe I bank in the wrong place.
Learn the English langauge. His "confederates" were his partners in crime.
I don't know what's scarier, the person who posted this, or the people who modded it "Insightful". Confederates Defined Perhaps the poster is from Quebec?
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
More appropiately called the "associates"...
Actually, no. "Associates" could easily be two or more people involved in completely legal activities. "Confederates" implies illegal or
at least questionable activities. It is the
correct term.
Cool idea. One might combine it with Massad Ayoob's technique. "...he always carries a $10 bill wrapped around a matchbook, and tosses that to the mugger first."
...oh, and sorry if the above link offends anyone. It was the only reference to Ayoob and his matchbook that I could find online.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
The way to do it is to buy goods with fake money and get real goods and real change. You can then return or resale the goods for more real money.
So why not $1 dollar bills? What exactly would that buy you? 1 Mars bar? That would only work if you had a very low initial investment to counterfeit and were just using it to take care of living expenses. Just the small problem then that there would be a steady stream of counterfits near your house with your finger prints on it.
You can buy more expensive goods with $1 dollar bills but people get suspiscious when you pay for a new car with a pallet of cash.
Counterfit money is the balance between being low enough in value to be easily accepted and high enough in value to be worthwhile spending.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's already an effort to do that, albeit not automated. Check out http://www.wheresgeorge.com/.
Well, according to the Bank of Canada, 36 billion was in circulation in 2001, and 19 cents per person in circulation was counterfeit. Canada has a population of about 32,000,000, so 32,000,000 * 0.19 =~ 6,000,000. 6,000,000 / 36,000,000,000 = 1.67e-4. 40% of this value was accounted for by $100 counterfeits.
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Now, the bank says there are about 1.1 billion notes in circulation, or 35 per person. If there is one counterfiet bill per 290 people, that comes to 32,000,000 / 290 = 110,000 counterfiet bills in circulation. So again 110,000 / 1,100,000,000 = 0.0001, or 1 bill per 10,000.
Obviously these places run around distribution rings and some places will see a much higher frequency than others. And one currency, the $20, accounts for 50% of counterfeits. So in comparison, those will be relatively frequent, while the others will be much less so.
http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/review/summer04/c
The US no longer uses bills over $100 in general circulation, mainly because the Feds want to harass anybody engaged in cash businesses, like drug dealing and tax evasion, and force them into electronic banking systems where they're easier to detect. So a Canadian $500 bill is worth quite a bit more than a US $100 bill.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is not the same as a Visa or MC Debit card.. where Visa or MC is taking a chunk out of the merchant.
The merchant's bank takes a chunk out of the merchant instead. Usually 35 cents per Interac transaction. Visa/MC charge a percentage of the amount of the purchase, usually between 1% and 4%. Interac fees are usually a flat 35 cents, regardless of wheter you're purchasing an 80 cent chocolate or a $50,000 boat.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
This guy had half an idea how to make counterfeit bills, and no clue whatsoever how to use them. His life style and distribution methods were no different than the common criminal with an IQ of 75. I used to work in the printing industry, and am capable of doing much, much better than this, including non-repeating serial numbers. I have gone as far as making plates that I know for sure would work quite wonderfully, just to satisfy my curiousity. There are 2 reasons I never did make any though. The first is that I couldn't make the paper. You can't just use stock paper, the real thing is too different, for a reason. The second is that I'm not a criminal, don't want to be a criminal, and prefer to live an honest life where I don't need to worry about someone looking for me.
That said, this Webber guy is not bright, he's just the brightest that you'll normally hear about. There are, beyond any doubt, much better counterfeits out there. Counterfeits that use (almost) real paper, (almost) real ink, and (almost) real plates. If I can make something better than Webber, someone has probably already done it, only better. I'm assuming that these have been mostly made by shady governments that have more than one motive to do so, and much better distribution channels. (Think "Super K".) The reason that I suspect you don't hear much about them is because there's no easy, obvious way to detect them. Telling the public that 0.01% of all circulated $100 bills are high-tech fakes would cause more problems than the bills themselves. If local banks can't detect them either, then it would make more sense to have them secretly taken out of circulation by the federal bank. Circulated cash is much less than that electronically processed today, but if people stopped accepting $100 bills and questioned all of them, it would cause way more harm than the face value of the 0.01% in circulation. (And 0.01% is a very large guestimate, I would think it's actually much lower than this.) Besides, even if the gov't COULD tell who was making them, there would be very little way to make it stop, short of bombing another country or 2. (Keep your fingers crossed that GWB doesn't make his second term though, or this may be closer to a reality than we think! "Iraq had no WMDs, but N. Korea has a US$ printing factory!! THEY are destroying our economy! You may now forget about Iraq, and Afghanistan.")
Anyhow, Webber is not a high-tech mastermind. He's a lowly criminal, and isn't even good at that. He shouldn't have been counterfeiting hard cash either if he wanted to make money. There are better ways to make money than that. There's a reason Frank Abignale (who I had the pleasure to meet in N. Carolina during a business trip) didn't make hard cash. And even Frank was caught, and he is REALLY GOOD at what he did/does. (He's a fraud detection and security consultant for most of the major banks in the U.S.)
'Do you really believe this crazy talk? At peak, Iraq exported 3.7 million barrels per day, or 1.35 billion barrels. 1.35BB * US$40 a barrel = 54billion dollars for a year. Within the last year, the Japanese were spending as much as 40 billion a MONTH to sell yen and buy US dollars to keep their goods cheaper for US consumers. Asia's foreign exchange reserves totally swamp any one oil producing country's oil revenues.'
If Iraq had been sucessful others would have likely done the same. Remeber France, Germany and others have a vested interest in the Euro and would have likely continued to have bought oil from Iraq (as per the terms of sanctions) using the Euro as currency.
"Saddam era Iraq would have needed a handful of other countrys togo along with him in a game of brinksmanship to try to tweak the oil market enough to change its ways. Not likely. Pricing oil in Euros was a political tactic, but not one that would ever succeed"
That's just what people said about the oil embargo of the 70's "Not likely. They would just be hurting themselves." Europe needs oil just like every other country and they already have launched and use the Euro in part to get rid of all the problems inherrent with conversion of funds. To think that the USD is sacred AND irreplaceable is farcical. If three countries switched to or more likely traded in tandem Euro and Dollar oil Euro would have been viable. If OPEC did it, the US would see sustained currency devaluation.
The parent posters theory on the other hand which states this is the only reason the US went to war is demonstrateably false though. I mean look at all the political brownie points they tried to score. That alone is a second reason.