Slashdot Mirror
North Korea's High-Tech Counterfeit $100 Bills
ESRB writes "North Korea is apparently able to produce high-quality counterfeits of U.S. dollars — specifically $100 and $50 bills. It's suspected that they possess similar printing technologies as the U.S. and buy ink from the same Swedish firm. 'Since the superdollars were first detected about a decade ago, the regime has been pocketing an estimated $15 to $25 million a year from them. (Other estimates are much higher — up to several hundred million dollars' worth.)' The article also advocates a move to all-digital payment/transfers by pointing out both forms are only representations of value and noting it would cripple criminal operations such as drug cartels, human traffickers, and so forth."
The US Federal Reserve has been producing counterfeit bills since its inception.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I have no idea why anyone modded this insightful. I assumed the original poster here was joking. But to the mod who took this as if it was a serious insight:
Cash is basically an IOU slip. Whether it's old-timey gold-backed cash where it was an IOU for a lump of gold in Fort Knox, or whether it's a fiat currency where it's an IOU slip saying that the US government will continue to guarantee its value for public or private debt. Or, on a currency exchange, it's an IOU for the relative amounts of other tradeable currencies.
To continue your dumb analogy; no one has a problem with the North Korean government photocopying US bills and framing them on their wall. It's not the duplication that's the problem. It's that they then represent it as legitimate currency for conducting further transactions. And it becomes a game of hot potato where the first person in the chain who notices it's counterfeit is left with something valueless. There's also devaluation risks if they print enough of the counterfeit, but in the context of the amount the article is talking about, the real risk is that the money is basically then laundered.