Posted on 01/14/2008 11:07:57 PM PST by canuck_conservative
DANDONG, China — In a Bank of China branch in this river city that borders North Korea, a currency changer stinking of alcohol pulled out a thick wad of cash from around the world and carefully removed a counterfeit 2003 series U.S. $100 bill.
The fake came from a North Korean businessman, he said, adding that, "The ones from Europe are much better." Were these fakes, so close to perfect that they're called "supernotes," made in the isolated communist country? The man, who refused to give his name for fear of arrest, shrugged and said he doubted that the North Koreans were capable of pulling it off.
To the untrained eye, the supernotes look just like the real thing. McClatchy tested its supernote on waiters, journalists, average folks and currency experts, and it was virtually impossible for any of them to distinguish it from a real $100 bill.
Here's why a supernote is super.
* The paper appears to be made from the same cotton and linen mix that distinguishes U.S. currency from others. It includes the watermarks visible from the other side of the bill, colored microfibers woven into the substrate of the banknote and an embedded strip, barely visible, that reads USA 100 and glows red under ultraviolet light.
* The fake $100 bill includes microprint that's \2,000th of an inch tall. It appears as a line to the naked eye, but under a magnification is actually lettering around the coat of Benjamin Franklin or hidden in the number 100 that reads either USA 100 or The United States of America.
* The bills include the same optically variable ink, or OVI, that's used on the number 100 on the bottom right side of the bill. This ink is based on ....
(Excerpt) Read more at mcclatchydc.com ...
“why anyone would make a fake $1 bill?”
Practice or a misplaced decimal point.
Or the Russians, or both. What better way to launder fake $100 bills than to let the Norks and Chinese gangs pass them around.....
And why did it have little choo-choos on it?
I am guessing it is all President Bush;s fault...
Actually it doesn't. The article points out that the mint has made almost 20 minute changes to the plates that create the $100 since it was made, and these changes show up in the counterfit bills. If it was North Korea why go through the trouble? Just keep cranking out the older bills.
On the other hand, if the U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to trace the flow of funding to terrorist groups, rogue nations, front organizations, what have you, then what better way to do it than to work with the Treasury to print a relatively small amount of currency with a barely perceptible flaw and then funnel these bills into one end of the channel and watch for where they turn up? Feed them into the pipeline in Syria, for example, and watch them come out in North Korea. Or feed them in in Saudi Arabia and watch them turn up in Afganistan. It also makes sense if you're going to use bills marked in different ways to track different cash flows then you're going to get a copy of the current plates and alter it for your purposes. That could explain how the Treasury department changes to the real $100s show up on the counterfit notes.
It really could be a brilliant plan of our intelligence agencies to track terrorist financing. In which case it could have just been completely compromised by McClatchy.
wow the US bills must be really good, the 100 and 500 euro notes only took a week or two to fake.
I was thinking the same thing. Ever see the British TV series Private Schultz? It was a humorous account of the forging of £5 notes by the Germans in WWII.
As I read the story, the ink is made here, at a facility operated by a Swiss company.
Analogous to the automobile factories here run by Japanese carmakers.
But try to save the nation from deflation by printing some C-Notes in your basement and all of a sudden everybody gets all pissy about it.
Why would anyone doubt a $1 bill? It's only a buck.
Make bigger bills, and someone might get concerned. So I would imagine they would receive the least scrutiny. Not much profit to the bill, but a dollar here and a couple of dollars there could add up pretty fast, especially if no one is looking for it.
Wasn’t there an incident this fall with some russian diplomat or someone in his party who passeed a fake at a store while at a camp david conference?
A flashback to Sandy Berger at the National Archives.
"Operation Bernhard" had many facets - printing, codebreaking for the serial numbers, paper/inks, ... and also had several objectives: (a) buy materials from neutral countries like Switzerland, (b) pay the various spy networks, and (c) destabilize the Bank of England's currency.
These notes caused the British to re-design their currency en masse - hence the use of color on their notes.
Yes, heaven forbid we might get some novelty toilet paper out of their visit.
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