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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."
n/t
It's Canadian money. That doesn't count.
(It's a joke! Posting anon since I'll be modded down to hell.)
Anyone care to summarise?
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/features/article.j sp?content=20040830_61496_61496&page=2#
A full page, printable link for all!
Guess it goes to show what determination and perservance can bring....Weber was incredibly obessive about the counterfeits, and as a result, plenty of people were fooled....
My MythTV HowTo
"All that Canadian money looks phony to me!"
"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."
One man can make a difference.
What is that like 84 cents US?
Work hard and you can 'make' lots of money.
Wonder how much 12.7 million is in REAL dollars ;)
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
How aboot the decision to make fake canadian money!
Is Linus secretly working for Microsoft?
Critical security flaws in Kerberos found in Unix, Linux, and Mac OS. Windows not affected.
The thing is, that I seem to remember a day when Slashdot was open and honest enough to discuss all sides of the issues. I guess this post will get whacked by an editor and my IP will get banned. Oh well... there are much better blogs out there nowadays anyway.
Of course crimes of this nature are usually closely followed by greed but imagine the possibility of someone only making enough to stay well under the radar. Of course that could be happening right now ;)
Isn't it great how there are advertisements for inkjet printers on the second, third, fourth pages of the article? Now you know, those things just pay for themselves if you use them right :-)
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Since that's how they've started treating it. If it involves the law it get put in YRO for some reason.
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
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
And now how in the world do we buy anything in Canada without $100 dollar bills?
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.
Some places don't even take $50 bills anymore. But they are putting new security features into the bills:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/counterfeit/
Good ol' CBC, making us proud
This is interesting; I wonder (purely out of curiosity I assure you) which nation's currency is the easiest to counterfeit (that is, requires the least effort). If one could make a list of the easiest currencies to forge and then print billions of those monies well, regardless of the exchange rates, that must be worth some american dollars. Make sure that the american dollars you get back are more than what you put into the counterfeiting machinery and materials in the first place and you've got a bone fide business! Capitalism rules!
Or, if you happen to have a pining for Mongolia, print out those Togrogs like nothing else and live like a khan in the beautiful ancestral home of the Khan!
Khaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!
"Highest-quality counterfeit currency ever detected"
Is that anything like "America's greatest solved mysteries" ?On one of those networks a while back I watched a show on counterfitting, and it had the story of an American tourist in England, I believe, who helped that countries police nail a counterfeiter who went by the name "The Magician". Quite interesting. Involving old stamps, tea, overcoats and chauferred limousines... like real-life James Bond stuff, except more nerdy.
/. Matrix)
I know it's OT, but does anyone have linkage to this story -- I cannot seem to find any, and thought the story was an awesome one. Hollywood ain't got nothing on teh real thang, I say!
(and sorry about posting AC, I am at a friends and don't have my USB stick with my LONG passcode to enter my
So how long before we see Canadian dollars running BSD? Will a beowulf cluster make my money work for me?
Every time you got pay check for friday's weekend, this pervert was laughing at you for all of your wasted hard work. He is not counterfeit "artist". He is counterfeit criminal, and a crook who must serve Dire Jail Time for what he has done to society.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Do many people pay for expensive stuff in cash anymore? I'd guess most everybody is like me, pay for the day-to-day stuff with cash, pay for the big purchases with Interac or credit card. And the day-to-day stuff is covered easily with 20s and lower bills. I don't want to carry around large amounts of money, and for bigger purchases most credit cards offer more protection than cash anyway. And with Interac in Canada, some people rarely pay in cash for anything at all.
This guy is clearly a loonie.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Pulling out a large wad of $20s just doesn't do it for them.
I hear tell they're going to ban P2P money sharing.
KFG
So he made the best detected counterfeits? Does this get him a title like smartest idiot? While we're at it, is he also the tallest short person?
Centralization breaks the internet.
They US Treasury has certainly made our bills more difficult to fake.
Canadian money is not called "confederates" - actually, that's quite offensive and really does show how the author either doesn't know anything about the world outside American boarders or just assumes his culture applies everywhere. Typical.
... 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.
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.
"All that Canadian money looks phony to me!"
That's OK. So do all your politicians.
I know a fella who was making counterfeit $2 bills by taking $20 bills and erasing the Zero!
LOL
He's no Frank Abagnale Jr., that's for sure. If anything, the article makes it sound like he was a small time criminal who the cops had fingered the whole time - they were just waiting to catch the ring in the act of printing to take them down. Sure, he printed a lot of money, but TFA doesn't make it seem like he'd do any better a second time around.
I am the only one who got ads for high resolution color printers on this page? Twisted sense of humor :)
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
if you want to talk about art, let's talk about JSG Boggs. this man DRAWS the notes BY HAND, and has been doing it since 1984. his art is not only his physical artistic ability in recreating the bills in great detail (with his little added puns), but in creating social networks around the passing of his bills. he tells people they're not real bills and gives them the choice of accepting his art in return for goods and services, or to accept real money.
what, /. editors believe counterfeiting is a constitutional right or something?
Some idiot actually accepted a $200 bill with GW Bush on the front. Its hard to beat that. Here is the link to that article.
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so, since no one really wants to take $100CDN bills up there in .ca, I guess it was a waste of time making fake $76.9645US bills?
vodka, straight up, thank you!
.. many places in southern Ontario will no longer take $50 bills, and those that don't often have the UV detectors. Sometimes if I take out a larger sum of money out of the bank machine, I'm peeved that I have to deal with $50s.
Any thoughts?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
I don't have any problems with counterfeit cash - I do all my transactions by credit card or debit card. Even the smallest corner store nowadays accepts electronic forms of payment. I'm surprised how the article doesn't mention the slow move we are making to a cashless society, which will make problems of counterfeit currency irrelevant.
Matthew McClearn 2004-08-30
Making money
Counterfeiting is on the rise in Canada. And nobody did it better--or did more damage--than Wesley Weber, the man who crippled the $100 bill
Locals knew there was something odd about their new neighbours. The cottage at 985 Lakeshore Park sits on a small lot on a sparsely travelled dead-end road, in a sleepy southwestern Ontario municipality called the Town of Lakeshore. Like others on this narrow spit of land, the beige, one-storey waterfront house lacks a basement, owing to frequent flooding from Ontario's Lake St. Clair to the north and a shallow canal to the south. A sandbar extends some distance out into the lake, discouraging water traffic and giving the shallow water a muddy appearance. It's a peaceful spot, a world removed from the distant office towers of Windsor and Detroit, visible to the west on a clear day. But during 2001, local residents noticed a lot of coming and going at 985.
At the root of the activity was a likable native of nearby Amherstburg named Wesley Weber. He sublet the cottage in March 2001, and soon he and three friends--Anthony Caporale, Dustin Kossom and Ryan Hodare--were spending lots of time there. But the men, all in their 20s, were not looking to hold barbecues or party into the early-morning hours or even, for that matter, sleep. Rather, they stocked the place with computer equipment, printers, high-quality paper, coloured inks, various chemicals and art supplies. On some nights, neighbours might have seen them burning large amounts of paper in the backyard firepit.
Weber and his team were in the business of making money--literally. From their headquarters at 985 Lakeshore, they were printing and distributing millions of dollars in counterfeit Canadian currency. By the time it was all over, retailers across the country would never look at a $100 bill the same way again.
Approximately $40 billion worth of bills now circulates in the Canadian economy. It's changing hands at any given moment. For cups of Tim Hortons coffee. For T-shirts at the Gap. Cafeteria food. Diapers and cigarettes at the corner store. Marijuana from the pimply teenager with the rusty bicycle. Canadians put it in their wallets and fork it over with confidence, secure in the knowledge that it's the most liquid asset going. Some people rarely look at receipts or count their change, let alone examine the Queen's mug to see if anything's amiss.
But that confidence is quickly becoming a hazardous oversight. Last year, the Bank of Canada reported a record $12.7 million in counterfeit currency in circulation, up from $4.9 million in 2002. Most of it was imitation $10s and $20s. "A large part of the increase in overall crime [last year] was the result of the more than 138,000 counterfeiting incidents reported by police," noted Statistics Canada in July. "Counterfeiting incidents now represent 5% of all Criminal Code offences, making it the sixth-largest crime category in Canada."
The consequences of counterfeiting are plainly visible, from coffee shop clerks examining notes under ultraviolet light to retailers' signs indicating a solemn refusal to accept higher denominations. The bank attributes the recent surge to the ready availability of enabling technology, coupled with the tendency of Canadians not to examine banknotes closely. "Counterfeiters know that," says spokeswoman Ginette Crew, "and see an opportunity."
Thanks to an aggressive anti-counterfeit campaign by the Bank of Canada and the RCMP, however, counterfeiting is becoming an increasingly difficult endeavour. The technology in a Canadian banknote rivals that of cellphones and other gadgets it shares pockets and purses with, putting the machinery and technical skill needed to exactly reproduce anti-counterfeit features beyond the reach of those who would thwart them. Fake bills therefore invariably suffer from visible defects. "It would be very difficult to produce notes that nobody could detect," says Ray Haywood, a former RCMP anti-counterfeit officer
And on March 20, 2003, an American president set in motion a war that has murdered 11000 Iraqis.
Matthew McClearn 2004-08-30
Making money
Counterfeiting is on the rise in Canada. And nobody did it better--or did more damage--than Wesley Weber, the man who crippled the $100 bill
...cont'd
The imperfections on every counterfeit bill constitute a sort of signature. Those flaws eventually result in their detection and removal from circulation, generally in one of four ways. Perceptive cashiers can notice flaws at point of sale and notify police; police also seize counterfeit during busts. At commercial banks, sorting equipment is designed to weed out counterfeit. "This stuff does not make it through the clearing houses," says Haywood. "It stops there. So it can't stay in circulation if it's in any kind of bank for very long." If it does get through, the Bank of Canada sometimes detects fakes among the damaged and soiled bills returned to them by financial institutions.
Counterfeit notes discovered in circulation often wind up at the RCMP's Bureau for Counterfeit and Document Examinations in Ottawa. Using microscopes and other instruments, RCMP investigators hunt for patterns in the flaws to determine whether large volumes of counterfeit originate from a single source. Large-scale counterfeiting operations cannot escape notice. And since surges in complaints tend to happen in relatively localized areas, police can often narrow down what region--even what city--a counterfeiting ring calls home.
The source of OSD-004 was hardly a mystery. Windsor Police and the RCMP formed a joint force operation and held a meeting to discuss the inundation of counterfeit in their jurisdictions. Among Windsor's population of just over 200,000 residents, there were only so many suspects. "All of us thought it was Weber," Bailey recalls.
Clever though Weber was at forgery, his compulsive criminal behaviour left him vulnerable. His own lawyer would later describe him as a "one-man crime wave." For one thing, the Chevrolet Tahoe he drove had been stolen by friends in October 2000. The very fact that he was behind the wheel was a problem, too: his licence had been revoked following his conviction on various dangerous driving offences. None of this had escaped the notice of police. "They could have taken him down at any time," says DiPietro.
Weber's recklessness in spending his own product was a big liability, too. His fingerprints were found on the imitation gift certificates he'd passed at the malls. He had also used five fake $100 notes to buy an ink-jet printer at Business Depot in London. At an auto parts supplier in the same city, another 21 fake bills bought him four rims for his Ford Mustang. That business's owner, who requested anonymity, says he noticed irregularities that night when he was readying the notes for deposit. They smelled like cologne and had an unusual texture. Closer inspection revealed that some of the notes shared serial numbers. The next day he contacted police; the employee who executed the transaction picked Weber out of a photo lineup. Weber was arrested on Oct. 23, 2000, and released six days later on bail.
Up to that point, Weber figures the ring had cashed $200,000 in counterfeit, but his arrest forced him to conclude that the strategy of self-distributing the fake bills was ill-conceived. He contacted an old acquaintance, whom he describes as a middle-aged man with both legitimate and illegitimate businesses. He showed this shadowy figure $1,000 of his product. "The next day, he made an order for $180,000," Weber says. "We sold it at 24 on the dollar. Three days later, he wanted another $100,000. And another $100,000 and another $100,000." Weber's ring scrambled to keep up with demand; they invested in technology and refined their processes. Output mushroomed, and as the purchases grew, market forces dictated that Weber--who, remember, was still under house arrest at the time--reduce his price.
Meanwhile, on the street, OSD-004 sold for as much as 70 on the dollar, Weber says. But he now wanted as many people between him and street p
Risk vs. reward:
It's just as illegal to pass a phony $5 as it is to pass a phony $100. You have to pass twenty $5 bills, which you could do in a single transaction or in twenty separate transactions. Either way, you dramatically increase the odds of getting caught. If you're going to take the risk, go all the way.
ROI:
Like you said, it costs real money to produce quality fake money. If it costs just as much to produce a phony $5 as a phony $100, but the return is significantly less, common sense and economics dictates people will try to maximize their return.
Bills smaller than $20 are not worth the effort to fake despite the decreased scrutiny they receive. Bills larger than $100 are not common at all and will be studied by a cashier/teller simply because they aren't seen every day. Thus, the "sweet spot" for counterfeiters in the currency lineup is the $20, the $50 and the $100.
~Philly
Wes has never been after more then a get-rich-quick kind of guy. Every type of scam/pyramid scheme out there he has tried at least once.
He has always worked very hard at not working. Anything to make an easy buck.
He has also been arrested for growing pot, (several million dollars worth IIRC).
This guy is not worthy of any praise or adoration. We (the family) strongly suspect that he was a scape goat for organized crime in Toronto. He is NOT the evil mastermind that the media is making him out to be.
I know his MO. He will be back in jail again.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Holy freaking crap!
Get a clue, Canada!!!
The guy did between $6 million and $16 million in counterfiet, and got a measley 3 - 5 years.
You shouldn't see the light of day for a minimum of 10, and then you should be working your butt of 16 hours a day to benefit society, some way, any way!
If the only way prisoners can benefit society is to ride an exercise bike hooked up to a generator for 16 hours a day, that is what they should be doing.
Prison is NOT about reform. It's about punishment and deterrent. Period.
In the article, it says that only 1 or so percent of all currency in circulation is counterfeit, I really don't know about that. I've worked with Canadian money for a long long time. I can easily detect which are real/fakes without a UV. I usually see about 10% are fakes, some are really good but rare.
I had the chance to see his bills, to the average joe, it'll pass just fine but to the more experienced, it's easily seen. What makes it so good is that in every aspect, and in the inexperienced hands using standard detection methods, it passes without a hitch.
When I was given this specific $100, I was told it wasn't local and I had no idea who was behind it, now i do. I bet he'll be back doing this in a couple of years, he's got the talent. I'm impressed, but he messed it up bad.
And before anybody asks, I used to count close to $100,000 a night X 5 days..
Scanners would contain the list of public keys, they'd receive an annual update which could also include key revocation lists for any serial numbers commonly counterfeited, or any keys that were compromised.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
By the INDUCE act, the title of this article encourages our consumers to counterfeit dollar bills, and a warrant to search your location will be issued shortly. Have a nice day.
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.
i prefer cash rather than gifts from my relatives on birthdays/ christmas
you have a good reason to prefer gifts i think
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think there is more to this, I think he is a scape goat for some internal mafia ring. Why else would you keep a low profile and get out 2.5 years? I am telling you this guy couldn't have done it with out his market connections.
"It would be very difficult to produce notes that nobody could detect," says Ray Haywood, a former RCMP anti-counterfeit officer who is now with the investigations and forensic services arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. "If the bad guys ever found out how to do that, they'd get quite busy."
thank you, mr. obvious
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder how hard it would be to just use OCR to track money these days. You could put scanners into each ATM that would scan bills as they were dispensed and store the serial numbers, a trivial bit of OCR. You could also have banks install scanners at each teller's station when they dispense the cash (many of Washington Mutual's new branches have teller stations that are like ATMs, you make your withdrawal and the teller never handles the cash, it is dispensed from a slot. By tracking serial numbers you could see how your currency is flowing. Additionally you could spot counterfeiting, if bill serial number 1234567890 is simultaneously used in several locations and scanned you could assume that it was counterfeited. No fancy RFID's required, just modifications to bill dispensing machines in banks and other financial institutions which could easily and quietly be mandated by the Department of the Treasury.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I think you've got a typo there. I think you meant to say:
:)
And on March 20, 2003, an American president set in motion a war that has liberated 25 million Iraqis.
Glad to help
- Fake money not as big a problem in Canada as in the US.
- Canadians were complacent.. so it was much eaiser to pass phony bills.
- Young man applied creative and technical skills towards making increasingly good fake bills.
- The main reason he made money was he was ambitious.. he made lots of fake bills of fairly good quality, and had connections to pass them.
- He was inevitably going to get caught, they knew it was him for a LONG time, and were just waiting for the right moment.
- He got caught.
- Canada now has a new issue of bills (which are quite nice).
Not included in story: Comments on how canadians are quite far along the road to a cashless society.. hardly anyone carries more than $20 in their wallet, and Interac, the nationatl debit network, is used for everything from a slurpee to a new TV.
....ultimately responsible for his downfall."
Like ummm...counterfeiting?
m
... I know what printer I'll get next.. a HP Deskjet 1220... :)
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
Read your own links if you want to not contradict your case!
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services
would lead to a much speedier apprehending of the offender.
Hence the key words, "ever detected". :)
Joseph?
All the criminals you hear about are dumb? They all do something stupid to get caught. The smart ones are the ones you'll never hear about. Maybe their crime will get coverage but you'll never hear the name.
I'm sure there are some smart one out there, but I've never heard of them.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
The US Federal Reserve bank started printing yellow notes in time that we could use them for the Yellow Alert. Once we go into Orange Alert, they'll probably have an orange series (or if the Feds ever stop letting the Department of Homeland Security call us chicken, we could go back to using greenbacks...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
But yes, the risk vs. reward is an important issue, and there's just the increased amount of work in passing lots of $5 bills - if you want a lot of money, you need at least $20s.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wait a minute here, he was arrested and paid someone to do his community service. Arrested AGAIN for counterfiting, was let go with a slap on the wrist. Kept getting bigger and better at it and was finally caught a third time? Seems to me that the first two offenses needed time in the slammer. The social engineering he did was clever, I liked that part, but it sounds to me like Canadian law is just way too complacent.
With all the advances in technology, why are mints still using paper money, that will always counterfeitable?
Why can't the mints move to using a public debit card type system, and provide stores with terminals to enable the transfer of currency? Public terminals could enable the exchange of money between individuals. Paper and coins could be used for $10 or less.
Right now, I can use the bank's card to make a purchase (but pay a service charge), or I can use the public currency exchange system (paper money). It's time to upgrade the public system.
The article said that Canadian bills were harder to do than US bills, though US bills are harder than they used to be. But the reason this guy was counterfeiting Canadian bills was because he lived in Canada! And the reason for the increase in Canadian counterfeiting was largely that he was pretty good at counterfeiting, though not quite good enough for it to be undetected, and greedy enough to want to make a lot of money, and the Canadian market is enough smaller than the US market that he could make a measurable dent in it. If he'd been enough better at it to make really undetectable counterfeits, like Fred Smith is, it wouldn't be a crime statistic...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
To deny you service. Bussinesses have a right to deny anyone service. The only time it can really get them in trouble is if they are categorically and automatically refusing service (like refusing to serve any blacks). However they can toss you from the store if they don't like you.
Well, cash is just an extension of that, they have a right to refuse to take your money and do bussiness with you.
That even really smart people make mistakes. You miscalculate or slip up. When you are doing that in a criminal activity, usually one is all it takes. I mean what may seem dumb and obvious to you is not that way to another.
:)), and often fool themselves into thinking they are smart enough to beat the system.
As a somewhat related example I wrote a program that worked almost, but not completely, right for a CS assignment. It frustrated me to hell and I kept adding more and more debug code, all of it reading that the program was working fine. I got fed up and called a friend and he came over to hang out. He asked to see the code that was a problem, and instantly (like hadn't even sat down) noticed the problematic bit.
This same sort of things can, and does, apply to planning and execution of a crime. You are smart and plan for everthing, but there is something you are just not aware of. Or you execute what you think is perfect but really isn't.
Also the more you do it, the more likely it is you slip up. I'm willing to bet many smart peopel could plan and execute one perfect crime if they tried. However if they keep doing it, there is more and more likelyhood they get found out.
Finally, smart people don't need to turn to crime so much. They have marketable skills that will make them a good living. They also have the logical ability to understand the likelyhood of getting caught and the consequences. The stupid can't get the good jobs (unless they go management
"I wonder how hard it would be to just use OCR to track money these days. You could put scanners into each ATM that would scan bills as they were dispensed and store the serial numbers, a trivial bit of OCR."
;)
Why do you think the serial numbers on US bills are printed in a machine-readable font?
Banks are perfectly aware of the serial numbers on bills in their possession. And no, it's not a troupe of monkeys in a back room reading each bill.
"His confederates" doesn't refer to money. It refers to his accomplices.
Look up the word confederate. At the Cambridge International Dictionary site, you'll find this definition.
"Confederate, noun:
1. A member of a confederacy; an ally. 2. One who assists in a plot; an accomplice. See synonyms at partner. "
Confederate is also used among currency collectors for confederate banknotes, but that usage is almost as rare as confederate banknotes are.
To your final word: "Typical." Not at all. Fortunately, you aren't typical of Canadians either. My experience with Canadians is that they are friendly people with a fine command of their language. I hope you're an American troll trying to make Canadians look bad. After all, you're a prig, you defend your prejudices with your ignorance, and you can't spell or even be bothered to use a spell checker. Oops! Upon checking out you r website, you appear to be the genuine article.How embarassing for you. Apparently arrogance knows no borders. (attend to the absence of the letter "a" in that word.)
NB: that's the Cambridge Dictionary as in "the oldest printing and publishing house in the world" in a gorgeous gothic town in East Anglia. Wouldn't want to offend you with a definition from the _American Heritage Dictionary_ or it might trigger another bigoted whine.
Finally, for getting a good feel for words, I like OneLook Multi-dictionary search is my favorite place to look up words online. It's a (wait for it...) multi-dictionary search engine. I love to have several definitions of a word I'm looking up.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Where are the high resolution .tif ?
I prefer cash, because I don't like the idea of leaving a record of every single transaction. Why should the bank know how much I spend at the liquor store, or where I go for lunch?
More practically speaking, debit card fraud is a serious problem. Fake machines that record the magstripe and PIN when you withdraw cash are becoming increasingly common.
I only use my debit card at certain ATMs, and withdraw $200 a pop (which always comes as 10x$20). I then spend that cash as needed. This leaves me pretty safe against debit card fraud (minimize my exposure) and if I ever get passed a counterfeit bill as change it won't be more than $10. I'm not worried about being robbed; Canada is a pretty safe place (one of the fringe benefits of having a decent social safety net).
AC's, trolls, and off topic, here's to the Karma I'm not going to have tomorrow. AC#1 (grand parent) you severly under estimate the US government's ability to muck in foreign affairs and get people (on both sides) killed, they'v been at it since 1970's. I think the cold "war", Iran/contra, funding the Talaban to fight Russia all fit that description. AC#2 (parent) I certainly do hope you're being sarcastic. If you actaully swallowed the bull shit that's being spewed out of Washington that might be a problem. The only thing liberated from Iraq was Irqi money, and US tax payer money laundered through "defense contractors" (mercenaries).
A Free Market requires informed intelligent consumers, such people are rare, we're in trouble.
Society works because if you're smart enough not to get caught, you're probably smart enough to make more money doing something productive and legal in society. Thus, the rational choice is to play by the rules.
I suspect if this were not true, society would rapidly decay into chaos.
..don't panic
money???? I always thought it was funny. That is what I have been doing wrong.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Dude, weren't you paying attention? It's *hundred* dollar bills. That's no loonie, that's a whole flock.
I wasn't curious about this guy, since I did RTFA. I was curious about the rise in conterfeiting in Canada in general.
That's certainy not all related to Weber, no matter how skilled at it he is.Not trying for flamebait here, just clarifying.
"Not that i'm a Liberal Canadian myself, mind you. I'm actually more right-wing than anything, but I just wanted to offer an alternative viewpoint."
See, that's why you guys didn't get in last election. You can't think narrow enough to make an effective right-wing.
Please point me to one that has a picture of canadian 100 dollar bills. Then I'll print.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.)
And is now safeguarding their freedom by using helicopter gunships against the civilian population.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like peace, freedom and security... nah, doesn't quite work for me I'm afraid.
I supported the war at the time. But how the fuck could I know the aftermath would be screwed up like it was?
I don't know, maybe it was inevitable that Iraq would fall apart, but part of me still thinks it could have worked out well if it wasn't for the complete and utter incompetence of those in charge of the operation.
Just one man's view from Britain: for God's sake please dump Bush.
The Gold standard. When money is gold, you can't fake it. Unless you have access to a large accellerator, a lot of energy, and a lot of time on your hands.
I love, love, LOVE that you opted to post as anonymous coward. I couldn't have said it better myself.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
They started paper currency coz precious metals were too difficult to test for purity and weight ALL the time . Also they were too heavy to lug around and too hard to denominate down (Silver, Bronze, Copper were used instead).
:) ...
<quote>
Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles across each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one
Pu.
</quote>
Oh, yeah and we should all switch back to Barter
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The 20s are the only notes with any other colors on them, and they are not very noticeable. And they've only been that way for about a year. The rest of our money is green
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
1. Print Money
2. ??????
3. Profit
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Yes, indeed in many countries you have to pay taxes when you create your own personal(group) money or it is forbidden. There are several private currency clubs, but I have forgotten the names.
For example in Germany, not so long ago(1666-1992), when you created a "wechsel" (called "bill" in english, but it is really a transferable and barterable debt), then you had to pay a tax on the "personal money" you just created. This isn't used much anymore but it was popular around 1935. It increases the liquididty of your enterprise.
In Italy, the mail office created their own coins for use in telephones, asimilar thing.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
In Australia the notes are plastic. You can't just print something off an inkjet.
meh
Alchemy, the ultimate hack! I wonder if they could make creating gold illegal?
I've always heard on AM radio what the right-wing wackos sound like. But, this is a first for me on the left. Let me guess, you heard this on the new democratic raido network?
Here's some advice, concentrate on finishing school and learning about the real world.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
The war was obviously about finding those cleverly hidden WMDs.
Erm, liberating the Iraqi people! That's what it was about!
It had nothing at all to do with economics or any sort of mucking about with oil. That's what those commie left wingers would have you believe.
And Haliburton getting all the contracts is really just a coincidence due to the fact that there are so few companies that do what Haliburton does. Fortunately most of the rest are French and everyone knows what assholes they are.
I mean, they didn't even believe Saddam was a threat or had weapons! We showed them, huh!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Nice try... Face the facts, you guys are stuck with us. The second you try to buddy up with the Europeans, GW will proclaim you a rogue state, that you are harboring terrorists, and that you are stockpiling WMD. Within a few months, we will bomb you, occupy you, and proclaim you liberated.
YES! And then the reparations begin. Can you start with Winnipeg?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Australia has bills printed on plastic with see through windows. Raised ink means inkjets don't stand a chance. Because it is so difficult to forge, it is only worth $0.70 cents.
i prefer cash rather than gifts from my relatives on birthdays/ christmas
...it depends on what he's growing.
you have a good reason to prefer gifts i think
The only older $20s still in circulation have a shiny foil rectangle with "20" in the top-right corner, and the new $5, $10, and $20 bills have holographic maple leafs on them. They also have a woven band through the paper (like the annoying "rub to check" band through the old Windows 95 Certificate of Authenticity) with the denomination printed on it.
How do they convincingly counterfeit these?
If you have been paying attention, the US government has been adding colors to our bills the last few years..
Personally I feel that it degrades them, that they should be left alone. It doesn't actually stop counterfeiting, it only makes it more confusing as to what is 'real' what is 'new' 'old' and 'fake'....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Money has to be trusted but it also has to be cheap to produce. The article noted that it now costs about nine cents to produce the hundered dollar bill as opposed to six and a half cents before. This is a significant increase. It shows they are taking counterfitting seriously.
There are many things that can be done to make money safer - including RFID type technologies. But each one of them adds cost to the production of the note. It can actually make it too expensive to produce I suppose. The money to do this comes from somewhere.
Speaking in general terms all costs are always passed on to the consumer somehow. So in a sense, the more it costs to make a bill, the less value the bill actually represents.
How can you reduce costs and stop counterfitters? By the methods most countries are trying today. Using special papers, special inks, special printing methods and extreme quality control.
Visa, Master Card and others would prefeer that money be replaced by little plastic cards and a great deal of trust in the banking system. But that cost is just to extreme to justify. Besides, there is a tradition that is hard to break.
Counterfitters are sure to be around for a very long time. The people charged with protecting the monitary systems will have to continue to make adjustments to ensure these crooks can be caught. But in the long run, it will be their own greed that will do them in every time.
The cashless society with fast, fail-safe UPS infrastructure.
You think after Hurrican Charlie, people in Punta Gorda could use their debit and credit cards locally?
On September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabian terrorists murdered 3000 Americans.
[If you keep less than $50 of cash in the till during night hours,] You can make no more than 50 bux (not minusing the cost of your goods)
One word: Plastic.
.. for a trip there (he's there at the moment I asume), and I was amzed at the lack of obvious security features on the money, the paper felt normal, there was no metalic strip woven into and out of the paper, no holograms, no watermarks, no transparent sections etc.
Though the 5-dolar note did sport the constalations (seriese of small round circles) which can be detected by color photocopiers to prevent copying, I didn't see it on any of the older currencies.
(The formatting and spelling are my attempt to reproduce the formatting of the comic strip and the local lingo, which I believe is called southern fried gibberish)
Howland Owl: Figger on makin' money with your new scheme, Huh? What's it this time?
Churchy LaFemme: Oh, we gonna make money.
HO: I guessed that! Doin' what?
CL:We gone make money.
HO: I repeats: doin' what?
CL: I tole you an' I tole you--
HO: WHAT!?
CL: Makin' money..
HO: If you gone stand there an' tell me you gone make money, tell me how!
CL: I'se jes plain gone make money!
HO: I'm gonna fight you with tooth an' claw! With fist an' foil! With club an' axe!
CL: I challenge you to a dagger duel at 100 paces!
HO: I'm gonna split you with bow an' arrow an' run you through with murderous spears.
CL: I'm gonna blow holes in you with ree-volvers an' stuff 'em with dynamite!
Hilarity ensues, and two strips later they don't even remember what they're fighting about...
"You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness." - My first recursive fortune cookie!
Wouldn't it be great to buy a blackmarket device and walk down the street, pointing it at people? Oooh, this guy's got 400$ on him in RFID' money, let's mug him!
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
There have been other, more sophisticated attempts, closer to the physics involved...
The story of Weber is eerily parallel to the story of Carmack and Romero in 'Masters of Doom', with the exception that Carmack/Romero were doing legal things.
Young guys working intensely, figuring things out, advancing the state of the art, making money and spending it. Then having it all end badly in one way or another (certainly not the same order of magnitude for Id/Carmack/Ion Storm/Romero but still there).
Also, the social engineering Weber used is very Mitnick.
"See, that's why you guys didn't get in last election."
No, the last election was rigged. The french have no intentions of getting out of the Prime Minister's Office. The Elections Canada bureau is controlled by Quebecers, and they calmly flew in the face of all the polls predicting a Harper minority, and cooked up a result giving Martin a minority instead, and one that will need all 3 opposition parties to combine to force a nonconfidence election.
I believe the mathematics of the pollsters (and there were many independently conducted polls predicting the same result) before I believe Elections Canada.
As a Canadian (living in the Toronto area), I would make the following personal observations:
1) I have not used a $50 or $100 bill in years primarily because none of the businesses that I frequent actually accept them any more. All over the place, I see businesses with signs saying: "We do not accept $50 or $100 bills".
2) For that matter, I think that Canadians, on a whole, are becoming much more of a cashless society. Our Interac system is ubiquitous and convenient -- it basically allows a debit card (from any Canadian bank) to be used in any other bank's ATM or at practically any merchant. Personally, I use Visa for every purchase -- it's free as long you pay the bill at the end of the month, and in the meantime, you get the "warranty / purchase coverage", and for certain Visa cards, 1% cash back at the end of the year.
For the past few years, I've usually only carried a few dollars in change (and maybe a $20 bill for emergencies) in my wallet at any time. The rest of my purchases are done through Interac or visa.
I love your sarcasm, but kneejerk's like him won't see your point. The sad thing is, I'm not even left. There was a time in this country when being politically right meant something about your political principles of A) Limited government B) fiscal responsibility C) fostering rugged independence among individuals.
But thanks to snap happy knee jerk republican drones like that, it simply means anyone who does not believe everything the current administration says. It's a disgrace to everything real conservatives have worked for for the past 50 years.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
"Weber was arrested on Oct. 23, 2000, and released six days later on bail."
Um, they did check the money he used on that bail, right? Right?
A sweet young thing? And what were you, an old sugar cane? Ugh. Saccarine juvenile object?
A previous American president enforced a blockade
which killed more than 500,000 Iraqis. So what?
Human life is cheap. Now threatening the perceived
value of little green pieces of paper... that's a
serious crime.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
might include this fine merchandise.
Well said indeed, sir.
If I had points, you'd get em!
[flamepants firmly on]
The (considerable) sympathy that I had for the USA as a result of Sept. 11 '01 has been misspent by the subsequent behaviour of the administration there.
I understand that the people feel raw that such iconic structures were destroyed and thousands were killed. However it really starts looking like you (the American "public") have become self indulgent sheep!
People that had nothing to do with the WTC attack play on it as if they were there (and seem to be taken seriously!!). Now, I live south of Worcester in England. If Westminster (London, 150 miles away) was bombed tomorrow, and I tried to play up a terrible sense of loss as a result (I lived in Deptford once), people would laugh. There's no way that any part of the press would be interested, even the gutter press.
It seems to me that the real terrorists are the children in the White House and the Pentagon. Your land of the free (which once was extremely attractive to me as a possible place to live) seems not so free anymore. It seems that your freedoms are steadily eroded in the name of "protection against [terror|evil]" by the gov't and in the name of "fairness" by your mega-corporations ([RI|MP]AA et al.).
Of course, being an Australian citizen and posting from the UK (the other "free" English speaking nations), there is a fair bit of the pot calling the kettle black going on here.
It'd just be nice if you'd get over it. I bet you'll have a hell of a lot of sympathy for Iraqis in 3 years time. In fact, let's look at how you consider the Vietnamese.
Move on. (now where's that fire extinguisher?)
Slackware user since 1997.
While your statement may have technical correctness, it shows that you aren't thinking at the level you should. Clearly, you are familiar with the concept of pH, and you are very likely aware of indicators used to determine pH. How hard is it to conceptualize a system that dispenses liquid phase indicator from the tip of a stylus rather than piece of glass?
I hope you won't be offended if I ask if you are young - or more precisely how long you have been an observer of such things, currently in your life or as a student of history. I am not particularly surprised by the current state of affairs.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
Ok, two things.
1) I actually voted for Clinton and Gore 1992,1996,2000.
2) As for Haliburtan, they also got no bid contracts in Kosivo with Clinton (and World War II for that matter)
Strange times we live in are they.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
I wonder if this has anything to do with some experiences I had in Mexico. It seems that nobody will accept ripped or torn bills, and the reason I was given is that the banks won't accept them. Of course, I discovered this the hard way; the bill I accepted wasn't really torn that badly, but I had a hell of a time with it, and finally wrote it off. It was a 20 peso note, roughly equivalent to $2.00.
The other experience was over a 50 peso note with the tiniest piece missing from the corner. It really wasn't discernible without extremely careful inspection. I was buying food, ice, and lots of liquor for a going away party for a fellow student, and the liquor store wouldn't take the bill! I ended up getting into a big argument with the owner, which escalated as far as profanity when I began to walk out without putting the items I wanted to purchase back on the shelves. Honestly, I was quite proud that my Spanish had progressed to where I could understand someone's foul language and then give it back to him double.
I went to another store a block away and had no problem paying with the 50 peso note, even when I pointed out the tiny flaw on the corner. The owner of that store was apparently happy to accept it when it was accompanied by a 500 peso note and a few 100s (It was a big party!) When I told him of the other store owner, he merely rolled his eyes.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.