Albert Talton's wild ride: Lessons from a $7 million dollar counterfeiter
Duh_OZ
bills, so how in the ???? did they get away with it for 3 years?
Snip:
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Over the course of three years, Talton managed to evade capture and
print $7 million worth of $100 bills. His team used garden variety
laser printers, computers and imaging software to circumvent
sophisticated anti-forgery technologies built into every bill. The
case illustrates how technology has made it much easier to commit high
crimes with tools available at a typical consumer electronics store.
Every week or so, Talton picked up new printer cartridges from his
local Staples store, dropped off his empty cartridges at the store's
recycling bin, and even used a rewards card to collect points to use
for future purchases. On May 15, he was finally caught with five
accomplices, according to Coin News
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Tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/lvefec
coinsusa
> Every store I go runs the highlighter through large denomination
> bills, so how in the ???? did they get away with it for 3 years?
>
That is not so hard to do. I'm not going to reveal exactly what to do,
but there is a chemical that the paper can be treated with to fool the
"magic pen" that everyone puts all their trust into instead of
learning to recognise the real anti-counterfeiting features. On the
other hand, there is another treatment for REAL notes that will make
the "wonderful magic pen" declare them to be phoney. Oh yeah... I
would expect to find both of these chemicals in a normal household.
Just for fun, can you name 5 anti counterfeiting devices used in a
current US $20 ?
part...@yahoo.com
Hmm, without looking it up... I know that the pen is just a simple
iodine-containing solution for detecting the presence of starch. (US
currency paper is a "rag" made from non-starch-containing fiber, I
believe cotton, while almost all normally-available paper types
contain starch.) So to get a false "fake" reaction, a prankster could
just soak some real money in starch, dry it off, spend, and let the
fun begin. The simplest way to make fake money pass the pen test
would be to use real low-denomination notes, bleach them, and print
over them with the higher denomination. Other anti-counterfeiting
marks from the low-denomination note would still be present that
wouldn't match the new fake denomination, but hey, if it passed the
pen test, few clerks would bother to try anything else.
Checking a $20 right now... 1) A watermark of Andy Jackson's face.
2) An embedded strip with "USA TWENTY" repeated. 3) On the front, an
eagle-with-shield and 20 are in a sparkly gold ink that shifts color
depending on how the light hits it- that would be hard to replicate
with a scanner and laser printer. I don't have a black light handy,
but I would guess there is some UV-sensitive ink used also. So what
nifty security features am I missing?
-Robert A. DeRose, Jr.
(Oh, if anyone worries about revealing the "secrets" of
counterfeiters: The criminals already know this stuff. Honest
people, especially tellers and merchants, need to understand how to
detect the fakes out there, and not get lazy enough to rely on an
easily-defeated pen.)
coinsusa
Here is a pretty good piece on the magic pen
http://calladus.blogspot.com/2006/09/testing-counterfeit-money-detector-pen.html
This is one of the more techie devices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
they also have micro printing on the note and blue and red threads in
the rag