Easy Way To Spot Conterfieit Money

Both. People will always try and get free money. Its harder to set up shop in the US so you do see a lot coming from overseas especially China and I think North Korea got their hands on some old dies too and have been pumping out older 100s. South America does it too. Really it comes from everywhere. Youd be shocked at how much money the Secret Service destroyed or takes each year for being fake. Some are real good like the government backed operations and some look like they were made on a printer and probably were after being scanned in.

Most, if not all Currency Collectors that know the printing process of USA Currency can tell counterfeit notes by touch. I have shown this to numerous people over the years (bank tellers, etc.) that deal in currency and feel the need to ruin a note with one of their ink pens just to see if it's real, and the thought of them using a pen on a error note drives me crazy (a short drive indeed)...
All United States Currency is printed on a Intaglio Press. The Intaglio Press holds steel engraved plates, and when ink is applied to the plates and wiped clean, ink remains in the engraved area, and when applied to the sheet of currency, leaves a "RAISED" imprint that is easily felt with the light touch of your fingernail..
Below are some photos I had just taken for this thread (with a cheap camera) that shows the "high" areas of the ink... If you place your thumb on the reverse side of the note, then slide your index fingernail ever-so-light over the lower left side of George Washington, you will actually feel the raised ink... Unless any counterfeit notes are printed with an Intaglio Press (like the USA gave the Shah of Iran back in the mid 70's where they printed counterfeit One Hundred Dollar Notes), there is a 99.999% chance if you don't feel any raised area (even on well circulated notes) the not is not genuine... If you ever have a chance to look at currency under a high power stereo microscope, you would not believe how high the ink looks...

I tried to capture the raised ink on the note below...

I have held phony $1 bills that were printed via the intaglio method. In truth, the only way to tell they were fake was due to the fact they all had the same serial number and that the ink was "brittle" on a few of them. :-/

From what I've heard the two hardest things for the fakes to get right are the security strips and the watermarks. They can get strips in but not so thats its part of the paper like the fed does. That process is probably the most tightly controlled information in the whole process. Honestly is the fakers were really smart theyd just stick to $1 bills. They draw little attention and itd be quite sometime before anyone figured it out but theyre greedy and always want the quick score

Thanks for the info

I have received numerous counterfeit notes over the years. Most are so horribly done that a first grader could pick up on them... which always makes me wonder why my employees took them in the first place. Occasionally one comes along that is very well done such as this one.





I was surprised to see it even had a recreation of the hologram done with what may have been green glitter ground up very fine. I was very impressed. It shimmered as you moved it in the light.



This note would pass the "pen" test since it was on actual paper, that paper just happened to be a five dollar note bleached and reprinted with $100. So when it was held up to the light the strip was in the wrong place and the watermark was Lincoln instead of Ben.

Even with the level of sophistication I am very unhappy with my employees for accepting it, since the best test for a fake is simply holding it up to the light.

I've heard that many of these are sophisticated fakes which indicated possible foreign government involvement...These are called "super notes" They really scare the feds as they are that good!