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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."
It's Canadian money. That doesn't count.
(It's a joke! Posting anon since I'll be modded down to hell.)
"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.
Work hard and you can 'make' lots of money.
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
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
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
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.
"Highest-quality counterfeit currency ever detected"
Is that anything like "America's greatest solved mysteries" ?So how long before we see Canadian dollars running BSD? Will a beowulf cluster make my money work for me?
This guy is clearly a loonie.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
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 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?
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)
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
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.
On a serious note(yes, I was joking), you don't realize this yet, but it's the Euro that gives the EU the strength to stand up to us(speaking US centric here). Alot of people don't seem aware of this, but Iraq was a proxy war against the Euro. Saddam began selling oil in Euros back in '99 and because of the strength of the Euro, this proved lucrative for Iraq. Other Oil producing nations were talking about doing it as a result. That would have threatened the dollars standing as the world reserve currency, and thus, Americas ability to live the good life on credit. As long as oil is priced in dollars, everyone needs our dollars and they need our dollars to be valuable, so they work towards making them valuable.
I know this whole thread is somewhat offtopic, but it really sucks that so few people seem to grasp the signifigance of all this. If you wanted to stand up to the US for real, you would need to embrace the EUs currency. The power of the US is rooted in the power of the dollar. Thems the facts. If the world rejected the US dollar as its reserve currency, and oil was suddenly priced in non-dollars, our ability to make war would be cut out from underneath us and our economy would collapse.
Research fiat banking and the history of it and you'll begin to understand why this is.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
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.
Do you really believe this crazy talk?
What exactly is crazy about it? It's not like I'm saying that a secret world government is working with aliens...
Asia's foreign exchange reserves totally swamp any one oil producing country's oil revenues.
How does this contradict anything I said? Think about this... Why does Asia hold dollars and not Euro's? Why does any industrialized nation choose to hold dollars, despite our debt, despite our deficits, despite the worldwide illwill towards America? Answer: They need oil and oil is priced only in dollars. This is a simple answer, there are other complexities involved with certain trading partners, but by and large, this is the answer.
Furthermore, oil is traded on markets.
Yes, in dollars. Versus other commodities that are traded in a variety of currencies. No dollar, no oil.
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.
Yes, I never at any point claimed Iraq could do much on its own. What we feared, what we always fear, was the "domino effect". Iran and Venezuela were both toying with the idea of pricing their oil in something other than dollars. While you can no doubt conjure up enough islamo fascist demons to demonstrate why we would target Iran, why did we suddenly villainize Venezuela? You'll see as we go forward, any oil producing country that talks about selling oil in anything but dollars will be quickly villainized. We can't allow it if US hegemony is to continue. Pricing oil in Euros was a political tactic, but not one that would ever succeed
Definetly not with one country doing it, but if a substantial number of oil producing countries were to do it, it would succeed. There is nothing crazy in what I'm saying at all. I think you're thinking I'm saying that if Iraq continued to do that by itself it would have toppled us. I wasn't saying that. If a substantial number of oil producing countries began pricing their oil in Euro's, there would be a large number of countries who would reduce their dollar reserves and increase their Euro reserves. This would greatly impact the value of the dollar and would substantially reduce our ability to sway other nations.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.