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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."
It's the only way to prevent counterfeit money.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
"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."
I would rather live in a world where I can carry cash and buy things without some asshole profiteer figuring out how many companies they can sell me out to behind my back.
The 2009 attempt to raise funds by devaluing its already pathetic currency revealed not only the country's fiscal desperation, but also the abuse Dear Leader was willing to inflict on his people. The won was devalued by 100 percent, which meant 1,000 won suddenly had the purchasing power of 10 won.
It appears they got the 100 to 1 ratio correct but I don't see how this is a "devaluation by 100 percent." Such ambiguous language would normally lead me to believe that a devaluation by 100 percent means everything is completely worthless (with zero percent value left). Wouldn't the correct devaluation percentage be 99 percent? I guess I would have preferred the fraction or ratio comparison instead if that is indeed how listing devaluation by percentage works in economics. Perhaps they could use better phrasing like "reduced purchasing power of all your money to one hundredth of its original worth overnight." Furthermore, how would you not riot over your government doing something like that to you?
My work here is dung.
The ink is made by a Swiss, not a Swedish company. What the hell is it with Americans that they confuse these all the time.
The real reason to go all digital for money is because it makes it much easier for the government to control what you can and cannot buy. It also makes it easier for the government to control who can and cannot go into business.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Don't cropy that froppy.
Electronic payment records are already being recorded and data-mined by corporations for fun and profit. If every payment is electronic, every payment is traceable and every thing you ever pay for will be recorded, compiled and cross referenced. I really don't trust corporations or even my government that much.
Just like copying movies and music: NK haven't stolen anything. The US still has all the dollars it ever has. It isn't like stealing a car where that deprives the original owner of the car. It's more like *duplicating* the car while the original owner still has it.
So it's OK, according to Slashdot.
Why does cash still exist in widespread usage? It clears at par.
If someone wants to pay you $10, and they give you cash or a check, you get $10. If they want to pay with anything else, be it Paypal, Square, some other mechanism, etc, the payment processor changes some ridiculous fee that will range from $.10 to $.50 or who knows what higher.
"Clearing at par" is why cash and checks still exist, and until electronic transactions are not only convenient and easy, but ALSO clear at par, there will still be a huge role for cash and checks.
Test your net with Netalyzr
...then get back to me on what a good idea all-electronic currency is. At least the state can't just make your Benjamins disappear when you become an unperson.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
American currency is stuck in the 19th century. All around the world, countries with currencies that Americans scoff at as "worthless" have invested time and money in redesigning their currency to 21st century levels that make it harder to counterfeit. But, whenever anyone in power even breathes a word of redesigning US currency, the populace flies into a rage, foaming at the mouth about anyone daring to pervert their sacred greenbacks. All efforts to bring the bills up to date have resulted in hideous, half-assed results.
I've actually heard stories first hand from a currency expert, who used to print banknotes in Europe, who was invited by the US to offer ideas on bringing the currency up to date, and the officials there rejecting each and every idea he put forward because they were "too different".
It's kind of sad. Everyone wants to counterfeit your money, and they're good at it, but you're too sentimentally attached to its archaic design that you're completely unwilling to change it.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
The law of unintended consequences would strike, and there would be an under-the-table economy using the currency of another country, the latter only too willing to expand its economy on foreign soil. All the cash that anyone would be spending would go to that other country only to be converted into dollars. I'm sure there are some people already making bets on that happening, a bets they'd handsomely profit on. Nothing of substance would change: there would still be illegal immigration into the U.S., only that some extra part of it would be diverted from the local economy to the foreign soil. That is in addition to whatever immigrants, legal or not, are already sending back home (not that it's a bad thing, I merely acknowledge status quo).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
We better move you all to traceable, trackable, revokable electronic money.
You thought your privacy hit the fan before? Wait til your every pfennig is nothing but a shifting index in the Federal Reserve database.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
We get the ink for our money from another country?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
There's an excellent Planet Money podcast on North Korea's illegal economy.
In the podcast they explain how North Korea is able to sell their fake currency, as well as the other shady things their government does to make money. It's worth a listen if you're interested in the North Korean regime.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What kind of technology goes into printing bills? Just curious, for the sake of philosophy.
All rites reversed 2010
This is completely wrong.
The local Ambassador of North Korea in my country told journalists in 2010 that by 2012, the North Korea economy will be booming and that it will surpass the economy of the US, or something like this. I guess they are simply trying in the best way they can. ;]
Ezekiel 23:20
Furthermore, how would you not riot over your government doing something like that to you?
Man, you really don't know anything about NK, do you?
Anyone trying would be shot. There's no press. Very little outside observation, almost none allowed in or out.
On top of that many of the people are very literally brainwashed to adore the countries leadership and accept blindly anything they say or do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course, this is exactly what the U.S. Government itself does: Print new money that doesn't actually represent any extant wealth and then "pocket" the full face value of the new currency. But then once these new bills makes their way into the market, the rest of us get to suffer inflation as a result.
It would do no such thing. More and more people are switching to simple barter mechanisms, precious metals as an intermediate, things like Bitcoin, and "alternative" currencies (example). If the government ever eliminates cash, this will only make such things thrive.
But the fact that North Korea is making a few million a year off of counterfeiting serves as a wonderful pretext for forcing everyone into privacy-less currency, doesn't it?
Liberty in your lifetime
It's stealing from everyone who holds dollars, and I suspect you know that.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wow, if they keep this up for 1000 years, it might inflate the dollar by 0.1%.
Uh, wrong, wrong and wrong?
North Korea has an estimated $20 billion debt. That's debt, as in money _they_ owe to other people, mainly Russia. And that's after Russia forgave them for about another $8 billion. I don't think anybody owes North Korea any money, and even if they do it is far exceeded by the amount they owe everyone else.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's exactly the same. The problem with counterfeiting money is it devalues the currency. The problem with illegally copying commercial media is that it devalues that commercial media.
Your solution does not address replay attacks. Unless anybody accepting a bill checks that into a central database there is no way to know that the same bill hasn't been printed a million times with the same copy of the original signature that remains valid.
If I send you a signed email, you can make a million copies of it, and they're all still signed.
... The government just needs a private key and digitally sign each paper bill it produces (similar to the current serial numbers but with PKI powers) and then when you accept paper money for payment you will need a computer to read and verify the digital signature is valid. ...
Nice thought, but it won't work. You just need a bill, and you can copy the serial number, signature and all.
What might work is the following: Manufacture each bill with a random "fingerprint", and and sign that. This fingerprint would need to be something that is impossible to create in given configuration (it must be random, and there cannot be any alternative non-random way to make it.) It should also be easy to verify. I do not know of anything that meets these criteria, but there may be something.
Money has no intrinsic value in and of itself. It's only ink on paper.
which is a legal tender for all goods and service.
Because the government says its legal tender. Why do you accept the power the government has to say what currency is, but you don't accept the power the government has to say what's copyright. You can't have logical consistency and say that the government have the power of one and not the other.
Kim, don't copy that dollar! You wouldn't steal a movie, would you?
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Only to the same extent that forging a movie DVD steals from everyone else who owns that DVD.
Oh, my bad, they're actually produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing - on behalf of the Federal Reserve and at cost to the FR of around 4c per note (regardless of denomination), but the FR are the only body authorised to *issue* them.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The author's dismissal of the privacy problems with going from cash to all-digital transactions, especially as flippantly as he does in his final paragraph, really lumps him in with the "if you've don't nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide" types. Yet another talking media head perfectly willing to trade everyone's basic privacy rights for a bit of perceived safety. In his mind, he's already won the debate, and it's only kooks and vested interests holding out. But don't listen to me, I'm obviously a cash-hoarding militia member, an anonymity-obsessed ACLU'er, the U.S. Treasury, Russian mob, Laundromat owner, or a person who has hidden a purchase from my spouse or income from the government.
It's not a matter of botnets - the backbones of these systems use leased lines, they aren't on the internet. They only talk to the outside world through transactions, the only way to access the application or OS is physically walking up to the machine. That's why you need access to dozens of machines, you need to fake them all out simultaneously. Then, it's only a matter of time before the transactions are resolved and your fake is caught.
I once worked with software that queried a credit reporting agency. Their security was completely nuts, and all I was doing was querying credit scores. Think leased lines, short-timeout encrypted access tokens, multiple layers of transport encryption, custom transport layers with multiple transaction verification schemes. They also did some heavy-duty traffic analysis - if you did anything even slightly weird you'd get a mail asking what was going on. This is just for credit scores, now just imagine what banks have protecting money transfers.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Citations needed.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The argument of this article smells all wrong to me. It was just a month ago that I speculated someone whether paper currency would be banned in our lifetime, and now here's an article arguing for that. Note the following about TFA:
(1) The article spends several paragraphs finger-wagging at North Korea and what dastardly bastards they are. (Although, "That sounds like a lot of money, but compared to the $1 trillion in cash circulating in the great ocean of commerce, a few hundred million is chump change... probably won't bring about a crisis of faith in our paper money anytime soon. ").
(2) Then near the bottom the article switches to a call to get rid of all paper currency, with a nice jab at "liberty" voters (as some call them), lumping the ACLU in between crazed militias and the Russian mob ("If killing all cash strikes you as a little too radical... At the risk of infuriating cash-hoarding militia members, anonymity-obsessed ACLU'ers, the U.S. Treasury, Russian mob, Laundromat owners, and just about every person who has ever hid a purchase from a spouse or income from the government, I would say this to Kim Jong-un and his posse of counterfeiters: Bring it.")
(3) Ultimately, the headline about North Korea is really just a tiny degree away from "terrorist" fearmongering -- and at the end, it casts off even that garb and goes all-out terrorist/ drug-dealer/ child molester on us ("Who would be most inconvenienced if Washington were to outlaw $100 and $50 bills tomorrow? Cartel bosses in Juarez, Mexico jump to mind. So do human traffickers in China and Africa, aspiring terrorists in Afghanistan, wildlife poachers, arms dealers, tax evaders, and everyday crooks..."). So long as it potentially, minimally inconveniences some "bad guys" then of course it's worth it, even if "killing all cash" (the actual argument) means the end of privacy and convenience for all of us.
Barf. I cull FUD and bullshit. Digital surveillance of every monetary transaction by the government -- that's real end-game here.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Bullshit.
Look at places where this has actually happend. Zimbabwe for instance. They use some other kind of normal paper currency.
A dollar might get you 3 eggs and a gold ring would get you the same. Convertible currency is worth more under those conditions than gold or silver.
The Chinese are more aggressive when they catch your money mules.
One might think that with the amount of US currency that China owns, they would care if someone (other than themselves) was manipulating the dollar's value.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
Bullshit. Money laundering became a crime in the US over 25 years ago as an anti-drug strategy. Clearly it didn't work, since drugs are cheaper today than they were back then, but every time you make a cash transaction over a few thousand dollars (can be as little as $2000, depending on the transaction type) a notice goes off to the government. From what I can see the net effect is if the feds want you they can bust you for spitting on the sidewalk then force you to plea bargain by threatening a 300 years sentence on financial crimes.
And it's hard to imagine what Washington couldn't know about you if every single transaction you made landed in some government database. Not that it will make any difference to the criminals - drug traffickers and pimps (and their customers) will start using euros, yen, pesos, or drugs as mediums of exchange. Or gold, or bearer bonds. Whatever.
No doubt there is security there, but think rogue APs, USB flash drives in the parking lot, subverted employees, etc.
I wouldn't expect it to be an everyday occurrence, but given the value of the target, I also wouldn't expect it to never happen if the easier routes are closed off..
No, the only person hurt when you duplicate a DVD is the person legally allowed to sell the DVD
No, the legal buyer is hurt too. Not as badly, but he is hurt. Let's take it to the extreme. Say that there were only 2 official copies of the DVD. I buy one of them for $20. Consider two scenarios.
1) There is no piracy. I feel pretty good about owning the DVD. I feel I got my $20 worth. My friends come round because they want to watch my DVD. I (try to) impress girls with my DVD collection. (Hey we were all young once and tried it.) I can feel superior to my work colleagues because I know what happens in the big movie, and they don't. And when I no longer want the DVD, the first sale doctrine means that I can sell it to someone else. And because few people have it, I can sell if for a decent price. Say $15. So the good experience of ownership has cost me $5.
2) There is rampant piracy. That person that bought the other official DVD has copied it for his friends, and they've copied it for theirs, until everyone has a copy. 2 people legally, everyone else illegally. I feel less good about owning the DVD - everyone else has it too. I don't feel I got my $20 worth because everyone else got it for free. My friends don't bother coming round to watch it because they have their own copies. There's no point trying to impress girls with a DVD that everyone else has too. I can't show off my superior experience of movies to my work colleagues because they've all seen the movie too. And I can't sell if on, because everyone else already has it. SO my bad experience of ownership has cost me $20.
See, as a legal owner of a copy of the DVD, I have been harmed by people making illegal copies. Yes, it's a gross exaggeration, but what's true of the exaggeration is also true of the reality, just to a proportionally lesser extent.
It's the same process as inflation through increasing the money supply. Scarcity increases value, ubiquity decreases value.
However, if someone started printing out millions of fake DVDs, it would not destroy people's faith in the DVDs and bring the economy to a screeching halt.
No, but it would bring the movie industry to a complete halt. Meaning movies would no longer be made. Same problem, just on a different scale.
I don't see how it devalues the media. If everyone on Earth has free use of a particular song, that song is likely worth more given that it's so well known.
If everyone has free use of it they don't need to buy it. You don't get any more extreme devaluing than that.
It would be useful in movies as a background song in the same way that Turn Turn Turn is used because everyone knows it and knows what they're supposed to feel when it is played. It can be played by bar bands. It can be used in mix tapes. The original singers could perform the song and sell more concert tickets.
These are all possible alternative revenue streams. But the first 3 also require that people respect copyright. Are you perhaps saying it's OK for you to break copyright law by copying the song. But filmmakers, bar bands, and mix tape makers have to obey that same law?
You'r very argument admits that the value of the song comes from the ability of the copyright holder to restrict rights for other people to reproduce it.
It really doesn't matter how many counterfeit $50s & $100s that the DPRK can print or dump onto the international marketplace. Not one bit, even if the DPRK counterfeited $1 Billion USD instead of only $200 Million USD. Compare that to the $2+ Trillion USD that the USA Federal Reserve has created out of thin air, and without even bothering to print them up. This was the amount of "digital dollars" that have been passed along to international corporations, foreign banks, and foreign central banks since September 2008. And this doesn't even count the new Fed Reserve QE3 initiative begun recently.
I'm waiting for the Federal Reserve to come out with a couple of new lines of USA PetroDollars, as toilet paper and wall paper. Forecast: Continued deflation / stagflation, with an overnight chance of hyper-inflation. I saw somewhere on YT a $1 Trillion Zimbabwean currency note. We aren't there yet, but that specter is in our future as well. Bitcom looks like a stable method of commerce in comparison.
North Korea wanted to make real money, they should simply set up a small 'economic zone'. A tax haven location, where extradition never applies and gold can buy you anything, absolutely anything, nothing to sick or depraved. They'll have the rich and greedy flocking in and readily generate billions every year ( the same rich and greedy will also seek to protect it).
North Korea ain't communist or socialist, it's an insane asylum with the insane in charge.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You're saying that the Most Powerful Country in the World can't stop one of the most backwater little burgs out there from screwing with our money?
Of course we could. All it would take is restoring the rule of law and limiting our government to coinage of gold and silver as the constitution allows. If the Norks want to mint gold coins that look like American coins, who cares?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Absolutely right. There's nothing wrong with printing copies of money. The government has no copyright on the design.
Now, as soon as you SELL THEM, or otherwise FRAUDULENTLY try to pass them off as legitimate, you have broken other laws unrelated to the copying of the bills.
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