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| Mysterious $100 'Supernote' Counterfeit Bills Pop Up Worldwide |
| 2008-01-15 |
| An underground counterfeiting operation appears to continue with $100 'supernote' bills popping up worldwide, while questions remain about possible North Korean ties to the phony bills. The 'supernote' appears to be made from the same cotton and linen mix that distinguishes U.S. currency from other currency. It even has watermarks visible from the other side of the bill, colored microfibers woven into the substrate of the banknote and an embedded strip, barely visible, that reads USA 100 and glows red under ultraviolet light. The secret operation, stumping officials worldwide, could be the "most sophisticated counterfeiting operation in the world," former congressman James Kolbe told McClatchy Newspapers. "We are not certain as to how this is being done or how it's happening," Kolbe said. The supernotes could be made by someone who has access to government printing equipment, said Thomas Ferguson, former director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Lawmakers accused North Korean leaders of involvement in the counterfeiting ring but the origin is questionable. Other experts suspect Iran and criminal gangs in Russia or China. President Bush claimed two years ago "we are aggressively saying to the North Koreans ... don't counterfeit our money." But the Bush administration no longer publicly accuses North Korea of being behind the supernotes. In the late 1990s, North Korean diplomats were caught passing supernotes. In August 2005, the Secret Service found Chinese crime gangs smuggling some of the bills into New Jersey and Los Angeles. John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said he didn't see evidence that North Korea was behind the supernotes but pointed out their distribution of them. Meanwhile, banks continue seizing the supernotes, with about $50 million worth found so far. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #22 Barcodes on the bills would be cheaper to implement & about as usable in tracking items anywhere. If the counterfeit is so very good, how does anyone distinguish the real from the un-real forms? People who have religious fervor for the gold standard have been saying the USA has been counterfeiting its own money for decades anyway, so why complain if some other country does it too? Some historians & economists have made a case that counterfeit currency may enhance local economies when reliable currency is in short supply. The #7 comment is another wrinkle on this. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2008-01-15 23:36 |
| #21 #6: We'd counter by forging Nork bills, but they seem to be worthless. Print enough to fly over their Capitol and rain money down, say ten tons or so of their equivalent of 50 buck notes.repeat daily with different denominations until all their currency is fake/watered down to worthless, no banning one bill and ending the problem. That'l larn 'em. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2008-01-15 23:30 |
| #20 You could really track money movements with RFID bills... In the mean time .... gasoline increases in value... barter anyone? |
| Posted by: 3dc 2008-01-15 23:06 |
| #19 #18 refers to ed's piece above. |
| Posted by: Grunter 2008-01-15 21:00 |
| #18 It's hard to believe that today's CIA could keep this a secret. |
| Posted by: Grunter 2008-01-15 20:58 |
| #17 Meanwhile, Guam banks and stores continue to dispense - accept andor receive - off-colored/inked US bills in differentiated monetary values. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2008-01-15 19:35 |
| #16 If the RFID tag was embedded without telling anyone, it would be very telling as regards both distribution and source. |
| Posted by: Danielle 2008-01-15 17:09 |
| #15 BTW, the US may have to consider tech the world's outlaws don't have access to, such as an embedded RFID tag as big as a grain of sand that requires a billion dollar fab to make. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-01-15 16:16 |
| #14 Pakistan has bought a large amount of color shifting ink But I don't think the Germans or Swiss exported an intaglio printer to them. The Norks on the other hand. No Ordinary Counterfeit Thwarted, the regime seems to have changed tactics, harnessing new distribution networks and wholesaling the counterfeits to third parties who would funnel them to criminal gangs. In the late 1990’s, for instance, British detectives began tracking Sean Garland, the leader of the Official Irish Republican Army, a Marxist splinter group of the I.R.A. According to an unsealed federal indictment in Washington, Garland began working with North Korean agents earlier in the decade, purchasing supernotes at wholesale prices before distributing them through an elaborate criminal network with outposts in Belarus and Russia, as well as Ireland. (Garland denies the charges and is currently fighting extradiction to the United States from Ireland.) Details of the actual manufacture of counterfeit notes also began filtering into the State Department, much of the information derived from defector accounts. According to similar accounts compiled by Sheena Chestnut and the North Korean specialist in Seoul whom I spoke with, the regime obtained Swiss-made intaglio printing presses and installed them in a building called Printing House 62, part of the national-mint complex in Pyongsong, a city outside Pyongyang, where a separate team of workers manufactures the supernotes. ... A Swiss company named SICPA is the major manufacturer of O.V.I., and the United States purchased the exclusive rights to green-to-black color-shifting ink in 1996. Other countries followed, purchasing color-shifting inks of different colors for their own currency. One of the first countries to do so, interestingly enough, was North Korea, whose currency, the won, counterfeiters ignore. North Korea purchased O.V.I. from SICPA that shifts from green to magenta. For the purposes of counterfeiting American currency, it would be a smart choice: magenta is the closest color on the spectrum to black. “The green-to-magenta ink can be manipulated to look very close to green-to-black ink,” Daniel Glaser of the Treasury Department told me. “They took this stuff the same year we went to O.V.I.” According to Glaser, the North Koreans managed to fiddle with the new ink, obtaining an approximation of the O.V.I. on the bills. But according to out good friends at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung: South Korean police have stated that indeed, on several occasions in Seoul, considerable quantities of counterfeit dollar notes have been found in the possession of people from Shenyang and Dadong, Chinese cities near the North Korean border. But according to the South Korea police, the last time they detained a North Korean diplomat carrying large quantities of Supernotes occurred many years ago. America's accusations against North Korea are therefore on very shaky ground. And now the pendulum swings back: A rumor has circulated for years among representatives of the security printing industry and counterfeiting investigators that it is the American CIA that prints the Supernotes at a secret printing facility. It is in this facility, thought to be in a city north of Washington D.C., where the printing presses needed to produce the Supernotes is said to be located. The CIA could use the Supernotes to fund covert operations in international crisis zones, and such funds would not be subject to any control by the American Congress. One could comfortably lay the blame for the counterfeit money operation at the feet of Pyongyang's arch enemy. Thank you grubby, greasy, bloody handed, export your grandmother for a Euro burgermeisters. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-01-15 16:05 |
| #13 I guess I'll stop accepting $100 bills when getting my change. Just don't take any with kimchee stains on them. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2008-01-15 15:44 |
| #12 Look at the ISI. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2008-01-15 13:25 |
| #11 Anybody looking at George Soros? |
| Posted by: OyVey1 2008-01-15 13:20 |
| #10 I guess I'll stop accepting $100 bills when getting my change. |
| Posted by: Whomong Guelph4611 2008-01-15 12:12 |
| #9 Pakistan has bought a large amount of color shifting ink, ostensibly for printing passports. Neither the Pak currency nor passports use color shifting ink. The Indian IB (intelligence bureau) has recently intercepted a large amount of counterfeit Indian bills. Did Pakistan obtain the supernote design along with their North Korean missiles? |
| Posted by: Shavish Forkbeard2483 2008-01-15 11:57 |
| #8 Well, I certainly have noticed that here in China, anyone with US currency has their money carefully scrutinized before being accepted - if it's accepted at all. Yes, there are some people who'll take foreign currency as payment for debts. Euros or pounds are accepted without a second thought. |
| Posted by: gromky 2008-01-15 11:54 |
| #7 Actually, this might be an "American plot", for a weird reason. Years ago, the Iranians tried counterfeiting US bills, but the end result, astoundingly, was that US currency became far more powerful throughout the ME. First of all, printing accurate US currency is terribly expensive and even US mints have to work 24/7 to produce enough paper notes for even domestic consumption; internationally, there is always a shortage of US paper money. Transporting US bills overseas is also very expensive. When the Iranians did it, at full production they could only make a fraction of the value of their daily oil revenue. However, Iranian-US notes were a prized currency in the ME, and everybody wanted them. The iron rule of currency is that "bad money pushes out good". Everybody wanted to spend lesser currencies, but save US dollars. This meant that the *value* of dollars kept escalating, and eventually everyone wanted to trade in dollars. The end result was that the Iranian currency *lost* value, markets were dominated by dollars, the US didn't lose a dime in the deal, and even made a ton of money. The Iranians made millions that cost them billions. At the time it was remarked that Iran should have been designated a US mint, and thanked for printing our money for free. Now this being said, if we could convince other enemy nations to print high quality US fakes, we should do so. Importantly, while fake US bills are great internationally, if any of them make it back to the US, the *one* place where they might do us harm, they are snapped up and voided by the first bank that gets them. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-01-15 11:34 |
| #6 We'd counter by forging Nork bills, but they seem to be worthless. |
| Posted by: mojo 2008-01-15 11:05 |
| #5 President Bush claimed two years ago "we are aggressively saying to the North Koreans ... don't counterfeit our money." But the Bush administration no longer publicly accuses North Korea of being behind the supernotes. Because that would contradict the current narrative. This administration is prepared to let the Norks give Syria freaking nuclear weapons, why should they let a little counterfeiting get in the way of the peace mirage? |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2008-01-15 09:26 |
| #4 According to the German press, it's the CIA. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-01-15 08:59 |
| #3 Or it could be American-born English, or German, or Irish, or whoever would sell out their country like say Aldrich Ames, or Clyde Conrad, Larry Wu-Tai Chin, John Anthony Walker, and Robert Hanssen. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-01-15 08:16 |
| #2 I wouldn't be surprised to find organized crime in China, with corrupt government officials at their back. They could have built the printing presses with stolen technology from American-born Chinese in the Treasury department. |
| Posted by: gromky 2008-01-15 08:04 |
| #1 So can THEY print them faster than the Donks in Congress can spend them? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-01-15 07:28 |