Counteracting high-tech counterfeiters

• Tags:
• Treasury Department,
• Counterfeiting

Jonathan Skillings CNET News

Published: 23 Apr 2007 12:20 BST

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…would be to put features in a banknote that would make it obvious [to non-specialists] if someone used that kind of reprographic equipment to make a bad note.

The report had also said that within 10 years even low-skilled amateurs would be duplicating the images.
With the huge demand that people like you and myself have for taking digital photographs and being able to print them out to look very nice — and most us don't want to mess around with Photoshop, etc, and all those filters, to make them look very nice. The advancements we see coming in software says that a lot of those things that require an expert to do now — almost a graphic artist — will be easily done by improved software.

And that's within 10 years.
Yes. It's happening now, but within 10 years it will be a piece of cake.

Looking at just the domestic counterfeiters, how many right now are making the kind of bills you and I would be able to [spot] right away, with smudgy ink and that sort of thing, and how many are using the more sophisticated, high-tech methods?
That's a good question, and that's why we separated the counterfeiters into five different categories. The lowest category — it's immediately obvious those are counterfeit notes and so we didn't spend a whole lot of time on that class of counterfeiter... The petty criminal, and the opportunistic counterfeiter, that's really the most onerous ones that we considered.

[Based on] some data from the Secret Service, it looked like about a third of the counterfeits was from the professionals and maybe about 20 percent from the state-sponsored, and then the rest was these opportunistic and petty criminals, so that's almost half. What we really would like to go after is the opportunistic and petty criminals, in fact to discourage them from even trying to counterfeit in the first place.

And what we're talking about here is basically the reproduction of the image, as opposed to the contents or the construction of the currency?
That's the thought. As we advance, the banknote would be more than just the two-dimensional image and would include features embedded — well, like there is now actually, but to do more that sort of thing.

Let's look at some of the specific suggestions. One suggestion was the use of plastic in the currency.
There is a security thread in there, which actually is a strip of plastic, and so one could extend that idea — you know, embed more plastic things or even a plastic window in the currency. There are a lot of neat things that we thought of doing. Of course, the Achilles heel that you've to look at is... the durability.

Counterfeiters don't have to do something exactly right — all they have to do is emulate it or make it good enough to pass once. So the other trick is to design some of these new features, like using plastic…

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