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Make Money Fast
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."
So this is filed under the YRO category because....?
Or is counterfeiting another one of those things t3h 3v1l g0v3rnm3n7 is trying to take away?
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
At least it's harder to make Canadian money, with all the colours, than the green USD.
Pretty hard to find stores that take $100 bills these days around here, but the article notes that acceptance is improving, that counterfeit money is quite rare (1 bill per 290 people) ... and that new bill technology is making it harder and harder...
Also points out that the vast majority of people are lazy, don't look at the bills, and that frequently even really bad copies will be accepted from time to time...
Platform independent bug tracking software
highest-quality counterfeit currency ever detected
Yeah those who do better are never detected. He is still not good enough obviously.
Can you ping me now?... Good!
"Highest-quality counterfeit currency ever detected"
Is that anything like "America's greatest solved mysteries" ?I highly recommend RTFAing. It's a good story, and lots of juicy techy details.
The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that whatever technical features they introduce to protect banknotes, it doesn't do a damn bit of good unless every high-school dropout grocery clerk can use those features effectively to identify bad notes. You could have forty kinds of anti-counterfeiting devices on a note, but unless the public can easily and quickly use those features, they aren't going to help.
This got me started thinking on using crypto to protect banknotes--try embedding an RFID-type device into every banknote, with a simple chip that can perform a SHA-1 signing back-ending the RFID mechanism. An RF device sends a random number to the bill, which receives that number and SHA-1 signs it, and returns the signature. If you put the same private key into all of the bills, you could build relatively simple, hand-held currency scanners that all have the public key and can verify that the bill is real.
This has its problems:
1) Can we actually build a chip/RF mechanism small enough and robust enough to be used in paper currency?
2) I can imagine this kind of mechanism adding a lot of expense to the note manufacturing process.
3) In order to use this, you'd have to distribute gazillions of RF scanners to the point-of-sale. Expensive, and not fast to get that kind of gadget penetration.
4) Tamper-resistence: you have to build the SHA-1 chips so that they can't be broken open. This is similar to the MS Trusted Computing issue--is it possible to store a key in a physical device such that the key cannot be extracted physically?
That last problem is the worst--it's a lot like the DVD CSS encryption scheme problem. It works find until ONE INSTANCE of the private key gets broken, and then everybody has the key to every single banknote in circulation. And then the whole thing is kaput, money down the drain (literally). So it would be awfully important to solve the tamper-proofing issue, before you went ahead with this idea.
Shit, I gotta get a girlfriend--posting coherent ideas to Slashdot at 11 on a Friday night is pretty busted.
If $50 or $100 is all you've got then you head over to an ATM and get some twenties. You can find those easily in the industralized world, right? No reason for the guy behind the register in the convenience store to have to assume the added risk of having hundreds of dollars in the till. You're not the only one for which it can be an issue of safety, you know?
As a business man, why should I do business with you if I don't want to? Maybe I'm not so desparate or greedy that I need your money. Don't be so self-centred!
It's ALWAYS detected. The thing is money has serial numbers and those are tracked. So, even if you print counterfit bills that are 100% identicle to real ones (nearly impossible) you'll either being coliding with existing serial numbers, or using ones that aren't valid. This'll get notied if you do it in any sort of reasonable scale.
It's the same thing as why there are no usable keygens for MMORPGs. It's not that the crackers can't reverse the algoithm for the keys, that's trivial. Problem is any key you generate will either be one that hasn't yet been issued, and therefore is invalid on the servers (most likely), or one that has been issued, and thus can't be used again.