How Counterfeiting Works

How Counterfeiting Works

How Counterfeiting Works

How Counterfeiting Works, The allure of counterfeiting is obvious. If you could do it without getting caught, you would be able to print your own money and buy whatever you want with it. Counterfeiting is the ultimate technology for people who want to get something for nothing.

In the not-too-distant past, counterfeiting was a difficult and expensive endeavor. It required large printing presses and the ability to cut intricate designs by hand into metal plates. Today, it’s much easier to create counterfeit bills. As thousands of teenagers discover every year, if you’re willing to break the law, you can create fake money with a computer, a scanner and a color printer in about 10 minutes. Though whether it will pass muster is another story. How Counterfeiting Works

How Counterfeiting Works/ How to make counterfeit bills

In this article, we will look at the technology of counterfeiting. You’ll learn about the techniques that you might use if you wanted to create your own counterfeit bills. We’ll also discuss the punishment that you will receive when you get caught trying out these techniques. In the process, you will learn how to detect “funny money” yourself and discover whether the U.S. money supply is vulnerable to collapse from a sea of counterfeit bills.

Let’s say that you would like to start a life of crime by creating your own counterfeit currency. The easiest way to print your own money is to use your computer. If you own a scanner and a printer, it is pretty easy to get started. How Counterfeiting Works

The first thing you would do is put a $20 bill on your scanner. Then you would set the scanner for its highest resolution — perhaps 2,500 or 4,000 dpi — and scan an image of the bill. Your scanner would drop a file on your hard drive, which you’d print out to use as money.

The Importance of Paper and Best place to buy counterfeit money

People know what money feels like. People who handle money constantly, like bank tellers, cashiers and waitstaff, can feel a counterfeit bill instantly if the paper is wrong.

That “feel of money” comes from at least three different things that make the paper in paper bills unique:

• Normal paper that you use on a day-to-day basis (newspaper, notebook paper, paper in books, etc.) is made from the cellulose found in trees. Paper used for money, on the other hand, is made from cotton and linen fibers. This kind of paper is known as rag paper. One big advantage of using rag paper is the fact that it does not disintegrate if you accidentally run paper money through a washing machine.
• The paper used for money is thin compared to normal paper.
• The paper used for money is squeezed with thousands of pounds of pressure during the printing process. This makes it even thinner and gives newly made bills a special crispness.

The other special thing about the rag paper used in real money is that there are tiny blue and red fibers mixed into the paper when it is made. These fibers are easy to find in real money, but they are so fine that they do not reproduce very well in the counterfeit money from your inkjet printer. How Counterfeiting Works

The last thing a counterfeiter wants to do is print counterfeit money on “normal” printer paper. It will feel all wrong, and it can be detected with a counterfeit pen. These special pens, which often look something like a highlighter, contain iodine that changes color when it comes in contact with cellulose. At the very least, you need to try to find thin rag paper to print on. You can find this kind of paper at most office supply stores. How Counterfeiting Works.

Steps to create  fake money

However, the paper still may not feel right. That’s why some counterfeiters go the extra mile to get the perfect paper. The ultimate counterfeit bill would use the same paper used by the government. This paper, however, is nearly impossible to buy. It’s not sold commercially.

One of the most popular counterfeiting methods, used for decades by Colombian drug cartels and small-time scammers, is to bleach lower-value bills like $1 and $5 notes and reuse the original paper to print $100 bills. A skilled counterfeiter can even retain the original serial numbers from the $1 and $5 bills for added authenticity. Colombian counterfeiters use expensive offset printing machines to create authentic-looking (and feeling) bills, while other counterfeiters have printed millions of dollars in fake money from their inkjet printers using bleached bills. How Counterfeiting Works