We had a goo storm blow through Oakland last night. The boys and I were playing Halo while Mrs. Stuffy was making soup, when the phone rings. It’s my 16 y/o neice from on the otherside of the building, she’s by herself as my brother wasn’t home from work yet, and she’s hearing spooky noises. Well I’m of course thinking it’s nothing, but since I’m The Uncle I grab my rain coat and go to invesitgate.
This of course immediately unnerves Mrs. Stuffy who now must go to the door to watch my back. I first go to my neice, who has every light sans one turned off and is huddled in her room. I’m just about to tell her to swicth on some freakin lights and she won’t be so spooked when I hear a noise from outside. I run to the door, and my wife is pointing towards the back of the courtyard yelling “look”. I turn to my left just in time to see two guys running towards the street. Fast.
Now I’m more curios than afraid. See, behind my brother’s apartment there is only another courtyard and a fence separating our complex from another. There’s nothing back there to steal. I run up to the street, but there’s no sight of the two guys who ran. About this time my wife comes out with the Eldest Stuffyette. Eldest Stufyette being 5’9" and 175lbs makes a good body guard. She also brings flashlights. So we head for the back courtyard. Nothing amiss. As were walking back, Mrs. Stuffy proves her Nancy Drew like ability for solving crimes by tripping over a brick. She aims her flashligh at it, and there it is, weighed down by bricks is a wad of cash.
Eldest son picks it up and we bring it back to the house. As were counting it (about $380), we notice there’s something odd about the bills. They are too stiff and heavy. Apparently someone, presumably the guys who ran off, had photocopied twenty dollar bills front and back and then glued them together. We called the police, who didn’t warrant it an emergency. I assume the area seargent will come out sometime today to make a report.
That’s the weird part. I though new-fangled copiers were designed to not be able to copy money. Anyway, if you hold up a $20 bill to the light you can see a second portrait of Jackson that’s not normally visible. With these you can see the glue. There’s also susposed to be some kind od microstrip in it, but I’m less sure about that. My guess is that it might fool someone at a busy drivethru.
goo!? GOO!!!??? :smack:
Sounds like an interrupted delivery rendezvous or stocking a drop point to me…
BTW, what’s a goo storm? I’m remembering Cecil’s column on the sperm trees of Los Angeles, and the images in my mind are …disturbing. Although someting like a really heavy maple pollination or tent-caterpillar infestation or encountering one too many catalpa pods also comes to mind.
Although I don’t bartend any more, I see “funny money” being passed not infrequently. Back in the Eighties, I saw one estimate that better than 10% of all US$20–the most common denomination to be counterfeited–were fake. It used to be pretty easy to duplicate with an offset printing press. See To Live And Die In LA for a pretty realistic depiction of the counterfeitting process of the day.
These days, the quality counterfeit has far more stringent standards to meet. The newest $20 has:
[ul]
[li]an iridescent “20” in the right lower corner,[/li][li]an iridescent eagle & shield to Jackson’s right,[/li][li]Jackson’s portrait is slightly offset and overlaps the border areas,[/li][li]A hexagonal watermark pattern, varying from red to green,[/li][li]A blue eagle with olive branch and arrows,[/li][li]“TWENTY USA – USA TWENTY” under the Treasury Seal,[/li][li]“20” repeated in random pattern, printed in UV sensitive ink on the back, and[/li][li]A vertical magnetic strip on the left side embedded in the weave.[/li][/ul]
The same general features apply to denominations up to $1000 and down to $5.
Of course, anything that can be made can be reproduced, but the goal is to make it so technically challenging and expensive in capital that it is prohibitively expensive to print the stuff in quantites suitable for passing. A counterfeiter can’t just pull up at his bank with a suitcase full of newly minted bills and make a deposit; he has to “launder” the cash; not in the physical meaning of artificially aging the bills (though this is done too) but passing it off in exchange for “good” money. You can pass this off at Wal-Mart or the DQ maybe, but any bartender or waitron who handles cash regularly should be able to discern counterfeits by feel (normal “pressed” paper feels different than the woven “cloth” used for currency.)
What about passing them through vending machines? Like the ones at the post office that will take a $20 and give you $3 in stamps and 17 sackies. Are there enough of those that it would be worth doing?
When the new $50 bills came out, we found out that the back side would come out really well if scanned on a flatbed scanner and printed on an inkjet.
NOTE! We were NOT trying to conterfeit money, I discovered this when attempting to email a montage of about $8000 (of actual currency) to a friend…anyway…
The front sides had moire or whatever lines, looked really crappy. But the backs looked great! So we took some of the “backs” and wrote “Fooled Ya, Dumbass!” on the blank front, fold andd crumpled them slightly, and went to a crowded bar where we would strategically plant them back-side up on the bar floor.
Hilarity ensued as drunks “found” “$50 bills” and thought they had scored…until they saw the front. Hard to describe the look on the face of a guy who thought he had found some money, only to find that not only was it not real, but he was being had.
This was probably technically counterfeiting, but having never seen any legal tender with “Fooled Ya, Dumbass” as the artwork on the front, these were about as passable as the phoney $3 Bill Clinton bills.
Sometimes it’s difficult to get a vending machine to take legit cash!
A while back we had some scanned(?) bills passed here at work. The lunch ladies taking the cash were just so over-run with customers they didn’t notice the bills weren’t right. They used fives, the old ones, since the items purchased were small, and got away with about a hundred bucks in two days, before moving on. If we could only get our students to use their genius for good and not evil.
Copying paper money only doesn’t work if the clerk one is passing it to actually LOOKS at the bills. A 7-11 clerk in this area accepted a $20 that a 14 yo had copied only the front of!
It wasn’t until the manager counted the till that it was discovered.
They caught the kid when he tried to do it again the next day. (Different clerk. I think the other one was job hunting that day)
I was under the impression that bills larger than $100 haven’t been printed for many years. Or has that policy been changed with the introduction of the new security features?
I remember reading several years back in the local paper about some low budget counterfeiters. This was before the new bills with all the security features, and before color copiers came down in price.
These people had made a bunch of b&w photocopies of the front side of some bills (ones or fives, I think), and were running them through the change machine at the local self-service car wash when the police pulled up and wondered what was going on.
I used to work for a colour laser copier dealer, and I can tell you that the anti-currency copying features are sometimes ridiculously easy to get around. Not with a modification or anything, either. (Not going to say how, of course.)
Anecdotally, we caught a counterfeiter who had printed stacks and stacks of both Canadian and U.S. currency once – when we went to repo his copier for non-payment. Moron.
What’s even funnier to come across is “raised notes.” When I worked in the financial industry a customer or two tried to pass those off on us.
What they are is basically this: Dumbass gets a $5 or $1 (usually) and cuts the corners off a $20 bill (or a photocopy of one) and tapes it over the 5 and 1 signs on the corners of the lower-denomination bill. Takes it to the bank, and usually jailarity ensues.
I remember one coworker whispering to me as she passed to take the issue to the manager:
“I didn’t know 20-dollar bills had a picture of Abraham Lincoln on them now!”
