OT: Counterfeit new $20s debut
Darth Vader
Counterfeit new $20s debut
Here come the fakes: Bogus bills are starting to appear across the country.
October 29, 2003: 4:34 PM EST
By Gordon T. Anderson, CNN/Money contributing writer
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Less than a month after the release of new $20 bills
with features designed to deter forgeries, counterfeiters are already at work.
Last week, people in and around Brockton, Mass., tried to pass fake notes at a
convenience store, a restaurant, and a Radio Shack, according to the Brockton
police department.
Old Hickory's new look.
In an unrelated incident on Tuesday, phony bills showed up at a convenience
store in Quincy, Mass., according to Steve Ricciardi, Special Agent in charge
of the Secret Service's Boston office. An arrest was made in Quincy, he noted,
but there have been neither arrests nor suspects in the Brockton case.
The Massachusetts scams were not the only recently reported forgeries. In
Indiana, at least five fake notes have been passed.
A restaurant in Elkhart, Ind., found two of them. A teen-aged girl had been the
one to spend the bills, police said, though they have not since located her for
questioning.
Three other counterfeit bills have also turned up in the area in recent days,
according to Tom Cutler, a lieutenant and spokesman for the Elkhart police.
"All of them have been what I'd call 'sophisticated copies,' not ultra
high-tech notes," he said.
Federal officials said they expected to see counterfeiters try to take
advantage of the release of the new bills, and are prepared for it.
"We see this every time there's a new note put into circulation -- people try
to challenge the system," said Jeannie Mitchell, a Washington-based spokeswoman
for the Secret Service. "In 1996, we saw the same sort of thing happen early
on, before levelling off."
Discoveries are good
When the government announced last spring that the $20 note would be
redesigned, officials stressed that the move was driven by a desire to stem
counterfeiting.
News that fake bills are already being detected, therefore, may be evidence
that the plan is working. (By definition, the discovery of a counterfeit note
means an attempt at fraud has been thwarted.)
Among the new $20's security features are a watermark image engrained into the
paper; an embedded vertical plastic strip; and color-shifting ink, whose
appearance changes in hue from copper to green as the bill is tilted against
light.
The most obvious change is that the greenback is no longer just green and
black. The new $20 contains pastel background colors of pinkish-orange and
powder blue, in addition to different shades of green.
In the case of the Elkhart forgeries, Cutler said that the color-shifting ink
was obviously not present. "If you gave them a good glance, you could see they
were different," he said. "Part of the problem is that not enough people have
seen the new ones yet, so they don't know what to look for."
In Massachusetts, too, the false notes lacked enhanced features. "There was no
security strip, no red-and-blue fibers in the paper, and the watermark was
missing," said Ricciardi.
As the Secret Service's Mitchell noted, the government's outreach campaign is
explicitly designed to help people identify an authentic bill. "It's usually
pretty easy to tell when a note is a fake," she said. "It's very rare that
they're so well done that you can't tell the difference."
Only 1 bill in 10,000 is illegitimate, according to the Secret Service, but
widespread access to digital printing technology has made counterfeiting easier
in recent years.
The U.S. government seized about $130 million in (unused) counterfeit notes
last year, according to the Secret Service. Almost $44 million more was
retrieved from circulation. Nearly 5,000 people involved were arrested.
The multicolored new bills represent "an opportunity to be proactive,"
according to Steven Carey, who runs the Secret Service's New York operations.
"We're using new technologies to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters."
DrPimpDaddi
spent $30 million advertising it.
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