North Korea is supposedly the world’s capitol of US-currency-counterfeiting. In recent years, the Treasury has been making new bills with new security features to thwart this sort of thing.
Which makes me wonder: Suppose that a rogue country or crime group - with a decent amount of resources and smart people on hand - had samples of new US currency (which would be the easiest thing in the world - just acquire lots of genuine, bona fide US bills). By slicing it apart, looking at things from a microscope, analyzing, using infrared, etc., how easily could they
Note there is a substantial demand for U.S. dollars in foreign countries, so a good approach for the counterfeiter is to just distribute them in foreign countries.
As long as old bills with lesser security are accepted, they will be counterfeited. Nobody needs to learn how to fake brand New money. They’ll make bills that look like the old ones.
Both the above are true. Indeed a significant component of the world’s economy is based upon the exchange of US bills that never saw the inside of the US and never will.
Duplicating security features is always possible, the value in them is making it not economically viable to tool up to reproduce them. Printing stuff on paper is easy. Colour photocopiers were once enough to get a passable reproduction. Over time the complexity needed in the printing alone has gone up - and a lot of that is directed at photocopies or cheap printing presses. Micro sized type is one example, very complex geometric designs that break down into a mess if not exactly copied at the resolution of the design are another. Raised printing is another expensive to reproduce feature. Given enough money a state actor can purchase the needed quality presses.
The woven in security threads require you to basically make your own paper. If you have access to a paper mill and can dictate the paper production adding the ability to weave the threads into the paper production is not going to be a big hurdle. Again, only a state level organisation is likely to have the needed capability.
Here in Oz we have insane printed money. The new $5 billis quite something.
There are various levels of security features. Some are overt (threads, color-changing features, microprinting, etc.) and some are covert. For obvious reasons, central banks do not want any information about the covert features to be public knowledge. Here’s a general overview of the levels from Authentix.
I watched one of those “how they do it” shows about modern bank notes. I was surprised to see that the plastic security strip was inserted, not initially woven into the paper. They showed a brief glimpse of the machine and the large roll of thin plastic strip.
Money has no inherent value; indeed the only thing that do are air, water and food. Money has the value that people give it.
If a foreign government can make approximations of dollars and get people to acknowledge their worth then its as good as if it was backed by the USG.
As it is, I doubt foreign government’s who make counterfeit currency do so for much more than using them to payoff informal contractors and associates, you know the [del] terrorists[/del] freedom fighters that you support. Making fake USD is probably less expensive than buying dollars on the open market.
It’s worth noting that polymer bank notes were first developed and issued in Australia, in 1988 by our Reserve Bank and CSIRO and they licensed the tech to Innovia, where it’s now used by quite a few countries.
Given that the Guardian polymer process is highly guarded and only available from one company it’s significantly harder to forge any bank note using this over paper notes, and the polymer notes can also have transparent areas and holograms as well as the more normal security features, microprint, fluorescent sections, embossing etc.
But if the security features are kept secret they are useless since only those in on the secret (which will too many to keep it secret anyway) will be able to detect counterfeits.
In Jack Vance’s Demon Princes books, the government distributed special machines that detected bogus bills. Still the protagonist figured it out and was able to counterfeit 10 billion “credits” and get them accepted.
Regarding the color-shifting ink, I’ve read that it’s produced by only one company and that the US has the exclusive rights to green-to-black shifting ink. It’s almost certainly not a coincidence that North Korea chose to buy the rights to green-to-magenta shifting ink. Magenta is relatively close to black, and can be manipulated to look even more like black.