>'MrMouse says his single-ply bills do not have magnetic ink, and so they won’t pass machines designed to look for the presence of this feature.'
Clever tip for detecting counterfeits, found in comments:
>'A good strong, neodynmium cylindrical magnet stuck to the side of something is a great way to check US currency. Just hold a bill by the corner and dangle it close to the magnet. The bill will show a slight, but very observable attraction. Easy and fast.'
This is a key point. Detection by human is fairly limited as they only use their own, easily fooled, eyes and a detection pen, which can be fooled if starch-free paper was used by the counterfeiter [1]
Note that Krebs hasn't verified that any orders have been received (fake "reviews" in underground forums are very common). Lots of people have claimed to sell fake currency in these marketplaces and are almost always a scam. This looks like one too.
"Lots of people have claimed to sell fake currency in these marketplaces"
It's actually possible to print realistic currency as long as it doesn't match (in certain ways) real currency. When I was in the graphics industry we would get memos from the secret service. I don't remember the specifics but one was the size of the bill. IIRC it doesn't have as much to do (as you would think) with an exact copy.
So then the question becomes if you try to sell fake currency that isn't really even the right type of fake it's fraud. Same as if you sell any good online that isn't represented the way you describe it. And goes by the fraud laws.
But here's the thing. Nobody is going to turn you in if you scammed them on buying fake dollar bills.
> (fake "reviews" in underground forums are very common)
Do you have any references for that? Besides the top layer of these sites, I was under the impression that if you go down your "vouchers" go down with you.
10+ years of being involved in fighting cybercrime. He is mostly advertising on low end forums that don't have the established social networks that would punish false reviews.
"Possession of counterfeit United States obligations with fraudulent intent is a violation"
Specifically, at least on that page, it would not appear to be a crime to buy counterfeit money as long as a) you didn't use it and b) you didn't try to sell it.
I'd be careful. I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but that page only refers to posession. I seem to recall things existing that are legal to have, but illegal to purchase.
I have no intention of buying the money I was just curious specifically about the law surrounding the issue. If I did intend to buy it (for whatever reason) I certainly would check further. I just found the language on the page interesting I didn't expect it to discuss the issue in that way.
Police/prosecutors will generally try to build a case before they decide to simply bust into someone's house. And they work on that case for a long time because it needs to hold up in court. I'm not saying that it isn't possible (and of course depends on where you are) but if in fact the law specifically states that you have to either sell [1] or use the money (and not possess it - which was my hypothetical question) then I can't seem them breaking in w/o proof that that is the case. That's the "if".
You are kidding right? People's homes get raided all the time on just a phone call. They don't need a "case" and they will likely kill your dog just because they can.
I lived in Ecuador for 5 months, which uses the US Dollar.
A couple of local guys that worked for me had a lot of fun testing my abilities to detect fake bills, which are plentiful in Ecuador. Even when they gave me two bills and told me one was real and one was fake, I couldn't discern any difference after 5 months of them showing me all the tricks of the trade.
The copies are extremely good, and I suspect not many people in the US are going to spend the time to check if a $10 or $20 is fake.
The pens are worthless in general. Real bills can "fail", fake bills easily pass if they care to. The Secret Service will tell you to not rely on them if you call them up and ask about them.
A friend of mine had a $10 bill checked and confiscated at a corner store a few years ago. The bill was genuine, but a few decades old and over those past decades it accumulated enough starch on it to trip the pen. He had to call the local SS field office and get them to talk the corner store into giving him back his bill (the SS looked up the serial number, said that it wasn't a serial number known to be used on counterfeits, told them that the pens were shit, and told them to give the bill back).
I say the pens are worthless because, although they can detect counterfeits that somebody ran through their ink-jet at home, those sort of counterfeits won't fool a standard "look and feel" check anyway. In fact, they may give you a false sense of confidence and distract you from the more robust "look and feel" check.
"over those past decades it accumulated enough starch on it to trip the pen"
I can't believe that's a very common case. The pens are there to deter people from playing games with their color printers, and do a pretty good job of that.
Well, at least they do a good job of making people buy starch free paper.
I was responding to a specific point grecy made. People will check a $20. I imagine they might even change their method of checking if a different type of counterfeit becomes popular. I've only ever seen the marker or a UV light used in public, but criminals aren't the only ones capable of adapting to new circumstances.
Hopefully it's obvious that the seller mentioned in the article is probably not making or selling a darn thing. What authority are you going to go to when you find out the counterfeit currency you bought online anonymously with bitcoins was just a scam? His scam is, on a small scale, more profitable than actually manufacturing counterfeit bills and selling them.
Which doesn't mean the seller won't get a visit from the US secret service if he's crazy enough to be running this scam outside of Russia or Nigeria or something...
In NYC, at least, in 100s of places, I've literally never seen someone check a $20 in any way other than putting it up to the light, and that is 5% of the time. I'm sure it happens though.
I never noticed it in San Francisco or the East Bay, but I lived there a fairly long time ago. In the midwest, I see it often. Not sure what that's about.
Related..I thought maybe you could claim it as prop money for the movies but no dice.
"As it turns out, the Feds have strict laws about the production of fake currency. According to the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, a reproduced bill must be: a.) either less than 75% or more than 150% the size of a real bill, b.) one-sided, and c.) made with only one color (so as to discourage the reproduction of identifying factors). "
The Robert Harris account is excellent and there is a great quote from the forger along the lines of "A document isn't real or fake, it's efficient of inefficient". I highly recommend reading the book.
The primary question: How the hell do you get this to your door? If I was to order it to a physical box, I face major felony charges as the government has a website to hack, and I am not confident in some random dude's ability to secure his website with every known security hole patched.
Typically you ship to some drop address (e.g., a house you know is empty, or somewhere where they'll leave the package somewhere easy to surveil and pick up). There was a DC-area mayor who had drugs shipped to him in this kind of scheme (he was uninvolved) and had his house shot up by a SWAT team as a result.
who had drugs shipped to him...(he was uninvolved)
"had drugs shipped" is a little ambiguous: someone shipped drugs using the mayor's house as the destination; Mayor Calvo had no knowledge or involvement in this. Despite his lack of involvement, the SWAT teams shot both of his Labrador retrievers, including one that was fleeing.
In this case, wasn't a shipping employee involved?
I seem to recall that the package (drugs, etc) was addressed to the Mayor's home but was intercepted at the distribution center by the shipping employee (involved in the scheme) before being delivered.
Seriously, most people would order this for delivery outside the US (where it's even less likely to be detected if passed at a bank or bureau de change). If they want to use it in the US, order it for delivery elsewhere and tehn smuggle it in.
Ordering for delivery by the USPS would be insanely stupid unless you had a very clearly document legitimate purpose. I'm a bit surprised Krebs didn't order some for himself - with his public standing as a security expert I'm sure his lawyer could work out a way for him to obtain some and then turn it over to law enforcment after assessing it.
Of course, it's quite likely that this is some sort of honey trap designed to attract less astute buyers from the world of organized crime/terrorism.
"I ordered $100,000 in fake bills to assess their forge quality."
"As soon as I am done assessing the fake $75,000 I'll turn all $50,000 of it over to the cops. I wouldn't want to have $25,000 in fake bills lying around where someone might find them and wind up spending $10,000 in fake bills."
It would be a real problem if this $1,000 in fake money got out into the wild"
A lot of this concern would be removed if the US switched to polymer notes. Visiting the US last year I was surprised to see people immediately suspicious of $50 notes that I gave them. I've never seen that happen in Australia, even with $100 note.
You're attributing one thing - suspicion of a particular denomination - to something which it may not be related to. It may simply be due to how common a particular denomination is used in the cash economy.
In the Eurozone, €50 notes are very frequently used - it would be unusual to be specifically suspicious of that denomination - while €100 notes are far more rare.
To support this, I almost never see $50's. The dominant bill in the US is the $20, followed perhaps by $1, $5, $10, $100 in roughly that order. (that's my own estimation though)
You could be correct although I saw many other people paying for things with $50 notes too. I didn't think they were rare. Maybe it is store policy to do the counterfeit checks on $50/100 notes?
I can count on one hand how many times I've had a 50 in my wallet. We normally use 20s in the US. When I worked in retail policy was to check anything larger than a 20.
Yeah, it amazed me too. Not to mention the durability and quicker recognition by colour. And that $1 notes and the low coins still exist.
If the population is too immersed in tradition, win them over with the coolest notes ever. Something using dark blue and dark red with white/silver could look awesome. Rather than what we have in Australia, Canada and Europe where there are 5-6 completely different colours used, one for each note.
I wondered if it's something to do with patents? Australia's RBA has a subsidiary that prints notes for various countries. Maybe there's a competing technology that Canada is using?
> Europe where there are 5-6 completely different colours used, one for each note.
I quite like that and never really understood why US bills are only green. If I look for 50€ in my wallet, I’m going to skip over the blues and greens and essentially directly pick the right orang-y one.
I’ve also never seen anyone suspicious of 50€, people sometimes look funny if they see 100€, but even that happens rarely.
It's funny that no one is checking serial numbers. Nowadays it would not be too hard to look up in a database if the number was issued, is in use elsewhere, or belongs to a destroyed note.
Privacy, cost and protocol issues left as an exercise.
No one has found a way to make convincing one dollar bills for less than a dollar.
Heck washing dollar bills is a way to get base paper for higher denominations. (one of the incentives for moving away from consistently colored currency)
If you're relying on this one feature to detect counterfeits, that's a bad approach. Magnetic ink has been available for years to print onto fake checks (the account digits are MICR -- not just a pretty font)
Side note: One of the techniques that check kiters used to extend the float time was to erase the info encoded into the magnetic ink, which meant the routing & account numbers had to be typed in by hand at the processing center. The introduction of character recognition software means that technique is no longer usable.
Clever tip for detecting counterfeits, found in comments:
>'A good strong, neodynmium cylindrical magnet stuck to the side of something is a great way to check US currency. Just hold a bill by the corner and dangle it close to the magnet. The bill will show a slight, but very observable attraction. Easy and fast.'