What’s the reason for all the anti counterfeit measures when a person could just easily make and pass off bills from the '80’s instead?
Why go through the cost and trouble of updating counterfeit measures embedded in the bills…wouldn’t a criminal be smart enough to just make a bunch of bills from, say, 1985 instead of busting his nuts to make a current 2006 version?
When I go to the store and break a $100 from 2004 the teller holds it up the light and looks for the embedded material, then runs the marker across the face.
How would that same person test a $100 bill from 1981? Could they decline to accept it?
Unless you a have a fool-proof way of aging the bills too, stores are going to be suspicious of “old-style” bills that appear brand new.
Hell, I recently got an old-style $20 in an ATM and when I used it at a local McDonald’s, they gave me a bit of grief; I think the kid behind the counter never saw one before.
Still, you do raise a valid point, and I wish the government would de-monetize old-style bills. This would force crooks around the world to “convert” them to newer currency thus creating a great opportunity to catch them (most likely for tax evasion).
Merchants are certainly free to decline large bills if they so choose, absent a state statute requiring it. As for why not counterfeit bills from the 1980s, eventually it will get to the point (if we aren’t there already) that bills from 20 years ago will be completely out of circulation. Eventually there will be few to no legitimate old-style bills in circulation at all. At some point IMHO it’ll probably become standard practice not to accept old-style bills and those who happen to have them will have to go through a bank to get updated currency.
As newer bills come into use, older ones get removed from circulation. Eventually, older bills will stand out and attract a lot of attention, which is exactly what counterfeiters don’t want. You might get away with it now, but in 5 years those old bills will certainly be scrutinized much more than a new bill.
Yes, they could refuse to accept it. In addition, most people these days check large denomination bills. Most counterfeit bills won’t stand a close inspection by someone who is used to handling money. Counterfeiters nearly always depent on circulating their fakes in places where the light isn’t too good, like a bar, and where the person is too busy to look carefully at the bill. Making a bill that will pass after a close inspection isn’t all that easy.
If they rely on this conterfeit detector pen, they won’t learn much, as it doesn’t work.
Organized rings of counterfeiters print out money by the hundreds of millions and spread it throughout the world in countries where U.S. currency may be worth more than the local currency.
From Wikipedia
This is the real danger that anti-counterfeit measures are designed to combat. The stuff churned out in the U.S. is piddling by comparison.
So why don’t the counterfeiters turn to copying old currency? That’s already been answered. They don’t because the money is often being passed by organized crime and governmental forces and they’re not stupid enough to take hundreds of millions in bills that would immediately be suspicious.