Did criminals counterfeit money in antiquity? Have any counterfeit Greek or Roman or other coins been discovered? Did some of the Greek city states make underweight coins of their enemies or competing city states? What was the first instance of criminals counterfeiting money?
Has counterfeit money been tried as a weapon of war? E.g. why didn’t the Germans rain English cities with counterfeit pound notes to undermine their trust in money circulation?
Whoa! Six questions, here, and they cover a wide range of expertise!
Yes, counterfeit money existed in the Greek and Roman eras. Coins were reproduced in baser metals (since most, if not all of the value of the coin was the value of its gold/silver content) and coins were also altered (shaving the edges, for example, to get gold/silver from the coin) in a fraudulent manner. Not really “counterfeiting” per se, but resulting in a similar situation - a coin that isn’t really worth what you think it is.
And yes, in WWII both sides prepared enemy counterfeit currency. From this site:
"In the Second World War, all the major combatants would take part in this parodying and forging of stamps and banknotes. The Germans would parody British commemorative and definitive postage stamps and produce millions of dollars in counterfeit 5, 10, 20 and 50 pound notes under “Operation Andrew,” later called “Operation Bernhard.” The Germans also made satiric copies of British, American, Allied Military Government, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and Yugoslav banknotes with propaganda text on the front or the back.
"The British would retaliate by counterfeiting or parodying the stamps of Germany, France, Italy, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, and the German-sponsored Polish General Government. They parodied the currency of Germany and German army payment certificates, and forged the money of Japanese-occupied Burma, Malaya, The Netherlands East Indies, and Thailand.
“The United States would forge or parody French fiscal stamps, Nazi Party dues stamps, and the stamps of Germany and Japan. It would also parody the currency of Burma and Japan, and counterfeit the banknotes of Japanese-occupied Burma, China, French Indochina, the Philippine Islands, and Thailand. It seems that between the years 1939 to 1945 almost all the combatants were forging each other’s stamps and banknotes.”
Britain recalled all their banknotes at one point during WWII after they got wind of a German plan to flood the UK with counterfeits. The Germans were also trying to do the same for US dollars, but couldn’t get the counterfeits good enough to pass before the war ended.
You can find an extensive list of counterfeits used as weapons on this site.
As always, copyright me:
BERNHARD (GER 43) Operation to undermine the British economy by counterfeiting five pound bank notes. By early 1943, large amounts of these bogus bills appeared in neutral cities around Europe. Eventually, up to 140 million pounds sterling were produced, forcing the Bank of England to redesign the notes.
The WWII German counterfeiting measures may have hurt the German war effort more than it did the British. The Germans gave agents they were sending to British territory counterfeit British money to finance their missions; the theory was that they would lower the cost of intelligence operations and increase circulation of the counterfiet money which would hurt the British economy. But the British realized this and learned how to identify the counterfeits; from this they were able to identify and capture several German agents who might have otherwise gone undetected.
The British five pound notes were virtually indistinguishable from the German fakes at the time. I don’t believe that any other counterfeit denominations were actually passed off during the war.
The Germans used their fake stuff to pay CICERO, their agent in the British Ambassador’s residence in Ankara.
Raining bombs rather than banknotes down on British cities would have been a more effective use of the fuel and manpower required to do it.
Various barbarian societies copied Greek and Roman coins, not to pass them off to their originators, but because they wanted coins of their own, and to people who had never seen a genuine example they would look impressive.
Unofficial coining has, down history, been heavily punished as it threatened the whole basis of commerce.