I got myself a combo scanner/printer a few weeks ago. It also makes copies. So I tried to copy some cash (euros). But that only resulted in error messages.
I gather that it’s a common feature of copiers to refuse to copy cash, even though presumably, the inks and other features are such that the copies would come out quite poorly anyway.
My question: what feature or features in various currencies do copiers recognize in order to refuse to copy them? Obviously it has to be something reasonably easy to identify, but at the same time it has to be unique enough that false positives are rare.
I haven’t tried scanning or printing cash, perhaps it’s possible to make copies that way…
I don’t know the exact year, maybe mid-2000s, but older ones will do it no problem. Once the first color laser printers that cost less than a few thousand dollars started to appear there was a real incentive (and perhaps actual legislation) to ‘hard wire’ anti-counterfeiting tech into scanners, copiers & printers (laser and otherwise). I don’t know the actual methods used, they’re probably considered restricted information like how vending machine bill scanners work. If I had to guess I would say that certain parts of currency images are stored in the device’s memory and checked each time. Considering that I’ve never had to update the firmware in a printer I would also assume that all new currency will contain at least part of these designs.
Note this from the above Wiki article:
*Recent versions of image editors such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro refuse to print banknotes. According to Wired.com, the banknote detection code in these applications, called the Counterfeit Deterrence System (CDS), was designed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and supplied to companies such as Adobe as a binary module. However, experiments by Steven J. Murdoch and others showed that this banknote detection code does not rely on the EURion pattern. It instead detects a digital watermark embedded in the images, developed by Digimarc.
*
No, this won’t work either. Commercial copy (aka Xerox) machines, as well as home units, are all now merely digital scanners & printers combined, so they’re the same technology. Older non-digital copy machines (they used mirrors & lenses) will do it, but they’re hard to find (plus they’re not color).
I thought that you could print or scan currency, just not at 100%. So if you set the size to 200%, you can copy a dollar bill. Not that I’m going to try it.
I just scanned a Canadian $20 note using my scanner to see what would happen.
The machine is three or four years old, made long after copiers first bounced cash images, including those of Canadian currency. The scanner isn’t an all-in-one, though. It’s a scanner, exclusively.
The colours appear to be more-or-less correct, but it makes very plain a zillion other markings that are otherwise not visible except through a magnifying glass — tiny circles and small lines, in some places like a houndstooth pattern, and in other places, dots. They overlay the entire image, including the Queen’s face.
Trying to pass a print of that thing would land you in jail in under 30 seconds, not to mention all the other stuff not present in the counterfeit. Especially since Canadian paper money isn’t, anymore.
When I worked with law enforcement, we were required to make photocopies of currency whenever we were going out to make a buy (drugs). It was a monumental pain in the a$$ (large quantities of small bills), but it worked even with the newer copiers. When, however, we experimented with pen scanners (so we could just scan the serial number, which was all we cared about, for tracking purposes), the accuracy was atrocious.
True, but copying currency and actually using said copies with intent to defraud are two separate things, as different as carrying a gun (which is often legal) versus shooting your mother in law in cold blood (which isn’t legal).
Related question: Assuming that you did not intend to defraud anyone thereby, would it be legal to modify a scanner, printer, or copier to not detect currency? Maybe I’m an amateur gentleman inventor and would like to print off some “money” in order to test the new counterfeit detection device that I’ve been working on in my basement, or perhaps I want to print off a few novelty “fivers” for my child’s fifth birthday party. Neither of those circumstances involves people getting defrauded by being tricked into accepting counterfeit currency. Could I do this, or would I have committed an offense by disabling the anti-counterfeiting tech?
Yes, I know that the answer could depend on jurisdiction. So the jurisdiction here is “any jurisdiction, whatsoever, where the law on this is at least somewhat clear”.
In a previous office we had a modern copier/scanner/printer that had a digital display, about the size of a smaller laptop, which displayed all of the instructions and status etc.
I tried copying different Canadian bills with it and it actually displayed in fairly large font, something like “Invalid Original” or something of that nature.
When we got a new fancy top of the line scanner/copier in the office about 5 years ago, we tried copying some U.S bills with it. It copied $1 and $5 bills just fine, but any larger denomination came out solid black rectangles. So we were not sure if the currency protection detected something present in only larger bills, or recognized all bills and said “yeah, if you get caught passing off fake $1 bills you deserve to go to jail”
This is just a friendly reminder. Counterfeiting is illegal, so let’s all be sure to keep all posts on the legal side of things. You can discuss the issue and how various copiers and scanners deal with it, but do not post anything that might be considered a “how to” for counterfeiters.
Well, Photoshop wouldn’t let me scan the damn Euro note, but the HP scan software did let me scan it without a hitch.
Opening that image of the Euro note with Photoshop gave me a message about not letting me print the image, but the Windows Photo Viewer had no issue with it… not sure tho if I would accept that note as currency - not even at a glance, the quality is just way to low.
So , I guess, only high end gear has this build in, to mess around for fun seems fine, since you get nothing, that really represents proper money in any real way.
The easiest (and cheapest) way would simply be to reject images of a certain dimension. Modern copiers and scanners can automatically detect the size of an original and choose the appropriate paper size, so it’d be fairly easy to add a branch where the action is ‘display an error message’ rather than ‘pass size template xyz to the tray selector’ (which knows what size paper is in each tray).
The paper/plastic currency I’ve seen (US and Canadian) had the same size bills for all denominations (but different sizes from nation to nation).
The easiest (and cheapest) way would simply be to reject images of a certain dimension. Modern copiers and scanners can automatically detect the size of an original and choose the appropriate paper size, so it’d be fairly easy to add a branch where the action is ‘display an error message’ rather than ‘pass size template xyz to the tray selector’ (which knows what size paper is in each tray).
The paper/plastic currency I’ve seen (US and Canadian) had the same size bills for all denominations (but different sizes from nation to nation).
Hmm. My scanner plus third-party scanner software scanned the front of a Canadian $5 without problem; however, the transparent bits came out as white anyway, so it wouldn’t help a counterfeiter anyways.
Edit: when I went to open the scanned TIFF file in Photoshop, it popped up a message saying, “This application does not support the exiting of banknote images.”! Presumably the images one can get from the Bank of Canada for use in artwork, etc, don’t have this restriction?