I hope this isn’t two much of a tangent…
Suppose I go to a restaurant and rack up a $100 tab. I pay the bill by credit card, but leave a cash tip of $20 on the table. But the $20 is a fake.
Surely, I am an asshole, but have I broken any laws? The tip, though customary and expected, is not strictly obligatory.
What if I left two $20 bills, one real and one fake. Now the server HAS received a reasonable tip, plus a useless piece of paper. Does that change the situation?
Yes, in at least two ways:
And don’t call me Shirley.
Here’s the Federal statute
Whoever, with intent to defraud, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or with like intent brings into the United States or keeps in possession or conceals any falsely made, forged, counterfeited, or altered obligation or other security of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
You’re definitely passing it, and I’d say since it’s in the course of the customary transaction of tipping a server, it’s with the intent to defraud - it doesn’t matter that you’re not obligated to tip. As written, I think handing it to a stranger out of the blue would be illegal also, if they believe they’re receiving real US cash. I guess if you declared to the recipient “This is a counterfeit bill” you’d be in the clear, since it removes the intent to defraud.
And uttering it.
This strikes me as a mostly victimless crime.
One of the primary uses of money is as a medium of exchange, the other is a store of value. Particularly overseas, the odds of any half-decent counterfeit being spotted are presumably low, so it’s a game of hot potato with no victim until the last person/store/bank gets rejected when it is identified as fake. Sucks for them, obviously.
I recall stories in my youth where America’s enemies were printing boatloads of counterfeit bills in order to ‘debase the currency’. With the steep decline in cash usage, these plots seem even less likely to have any real effect.
IIRC that was a Nazi plot to mess up wartime England. They made very good fake £5 bills. What they didn’t count on was the British turning them in to the authorities instead of spending them. Although if I understand, at the time prices were such that that was a fairly large bill for the average person to have, anyway. (Like a $50 bill today?)
I recall reading that North Korea is/was making counterfeit US money, also very good copies.
The British 5-pound notes were counterfeited in Nazi Germany’s Operation Bernhard. The banknotes were about the size of half of a letter-sized sheet of paper, so quite large, and only printed in black and white. What made them so difficult to counterfeit was the special paper, intricate details in the etching, a specific numbering sequence for the serial numbers, and hidden watermarks. Germans picked out Jews with special printing and etching talents, saving them from concentration camps. The majority were dumped into a lake instead of being captured, and they didn’t make much of an impact on Britain’s economy.
I have one of the counterfeit notes, along with an original note from the same era for comparison. Of the two, the counterfeits are easier to find! (Ebay is helpful in finding them.)
The 1981 BBC “comedy” Private Schulz is a light interpretation of the affair, as is an episode on *Hogan’s Heros". It’s quite the story.
We had a fake $100 at the bowling alley I worked at. It was printed over a bleached $5, you could see the Lincoln watermark and the strip said 5 dollars.
I work in a grocery store and cash accounts for about 30% of our transactions on an average day. The plurality of our customers use debit cards, followed by EBT and WIC, and there’s the handful of stubborn old folks who insist on writing checks, but we still deal with plenty of foldin’ money.
As I said above, most of the counterfeits we get aren’t very good quality. Once in awhile an inattentive cashier will accept one, and we’ve wound up with a few of the motion picture bills I posted about above, but they’re usually fairly easy to identify.
A credit union once gave me a $20 which looked slightly bogus to me. I kept it in my wallet just to show to cashiers: “I’m curious – is this queer or not?” It looked slightly bogus to them also; none of them offered a definitive opinion. At some point I noticed it was missing from my wallet – I’d accidentally passed it!
I started traveling to and around Asia in 1981, and it was so much more lax than later. I can imagine that it would have been even more so in the early 70s.
I’ve seen a business give it back, and someone here said that they know of a store that does that. I would hope that the suspicion of a 17 year-old clerk using a pen that is known to give bad data doesn’t mandate confiscation from the owner of the bill. Furthermore, it’s open to huge amounts of fraud. “I’ll just soak some permanent ink into this marker and confiscate a bunch of $100 bills.”
That is okay, since the clerk has no proof it is counterfeit. Basically they simply refuse to accept it.
Brings to mind the guys in the movie Midnight Run. “We’re from the Secret Service and we’re checking for counterfeit bills. Can you show me the twenties that you’ve accepted in the last two hours? Hmmm… this one is a fake. We’ll have to confiscate it. This one too. And this one…”
These are all known in the industry as Level 1 features. Features the general public is expected to be able to use without anything other than their own senses. There will be a number of new and upgraded features coming out starting this year (assuming the schedule doesn’t slip) for US currency starting with the $10. After all, the US is currently using technology that’s 20+ years old.
https://www.bep.gov/currency/currency-redesign
For anyone curious, Level 2 is split into two groups generally considered teller assist and machine readable. For example, an ink that has a pigment that emits a different wavelength of light than it’s excited at and can be read by a specialized detector (or the eye depending on the wavelength and purpose). You might have seen something like this at a casino, for instance, if they shined a UV light at your bill when getting chips. Or a magnetic ink that a vending machine can read. Level 3 is for the use of central banks and is the first real test of a very good counterfeit using a few different technologies from different companies.
It’s a fairly small industry in terms of companies with not a lot of players.
Thanks but that link says, “Watch our $100 podcast to learn more about all that goes into banknote design!” Personally, I’m not willing to pay a hundred bucks to watch a podcast.
on the planet … NOT (necesarily) within the US of A.
some low-hanging fruit from AI:
• Multiple studies suggest that about 50 % to 70 % of all U.S. banknotes are held abroad—outside U.S. borders. Wikipedia
• A commonly cited figure is that more than 60 % of all U.S. bills by value are overseas, up from much lower shares in past decades. World Economic Forum
• Some estimates even put foreign holdings closer to the two-thirds range when including large denominations like $100 bills, which are particularly popular internationally. fraser.stlouisfed.org
… which is highly convenient for the Fed/Government … you print more money and 60% of the inflationary effect happen outside your country … and thusly being paid by others.
Physical banknotes are only a fraction of the total money supply, and it is everything that’s denominated in dollars which foots the bill of inflation, not just cash. So I don’t think it’s true that “60% of USD cash circulates outside the United States” means “60% of the cost of inflation is borne by people outside the United States”.
50 plus years ago, when colour printing was still novel, I was trained on an offset printer for office use. To print a good quality colour picture, needed five runs through in perfect alignment, so not trivial.
When it came to trying it out, someone thought that copying a £5 note would be a good test. He wasn’t the first, and it turned out that someone had actually tried to pass a copied note. Bearing in mind that it was printed on one side only and on ordinary paper, it’s no surprise that it was rejected.
I believe that it is an actual offence to copy banknotes, even as a test. Even more important these days when colour printers are so good.
The software suite from Adobe (notably Photoshop and In Design) fairly famously refuse to alllow editing of scans of currency, or even copying them.
I have heard (unsubstantiated) theories that the software detects specific patterns of tiny dots printed in yellow, which us humans can’t detect, that are added in the printing process.
In any case, I could not even scan a South African ZAR100, although I could scan my ID, which had similar complex visible patterns.