Fun fact: you are asking the wrong branch of the government.
The Secret Service will happily tell you about security features of currency, and behind closed doors help you build methods to detect counterfeits if you have a reasonable justification.
I was to be under the impression that it is not illegal to create your own currency. I believe the secret service protect "dollars" and issues related to that such as counterfeiting. If you have a link that says otherwise, i'm very much interested!
Notably, if you have a counterfeit dollar bill it's the secret service that deals with it.
I've read of someone who worked at a bank who was told that after getting a counterfeit, looked them up in the phone book, and they dealt with it promptly.
No but the Secret Service absolutely will. The FBI doesn't deal with counterfeit currency. But it is actually the primary reason the Secret Service exists.
Counterfeiting is a minor issue in our daily lives because so much resources have to be devoted to keeping it that way.
"By 1865, up to one-third or even one-half of American money in circulation was fake." [0]
Governments regularly have to redesign their bills in order to prevent counterfeiting.
Extreme punishments are given for the crime of counterfeiting.
It's not just private actors to worry about. Opposing nations could destabilize an economy.
When counterfeiting is not a concern and a currency system can be created with very little effort, we can make currencies that we have more agency over.
The demand isn't for a cheaper way to combat counterfeiting but for greater agency over how the money supply is formed.
There is a massive, global call for reduced wealth inequality that existing governments have not been able to address. I'm not certain that cryptocurrency can do it either but it does seem like a possibility.
It was not fraud by the institutions as such, but counterfeits was a big problem with as many as 7000 unique notes it was next to impossible to know which was genuine.
Post the civil war as much as half the currency was estimated to be counterfeit. The secret service was given the policing money task as a direct result.
There was streamlining of currency issue after that.
I mean, photocopiers have the exact same technology so the US Secret Service can see who’s trying to photocopy dollar bills. (Which is what they were originally created for, not as bodyguards)
For comparison, the American $100 bill was widely counterfeited (by the Libyans?) to the tune of maybe a billion dollars in circulation. The US Treasury left it be for years - too costly to detect the very good copies. Eventually bills were reformulated to include harder-to-copy features but for years the only response was to print fewer. Since so many good ones were in circulation already.
I've always wondered what incentive counterfeiters even have for trying to copy these new bills. I have several $100 bills from around 20 years ago that I keep in a safe as an emergency reserve and they're still legal tender as far as I know. Why wouldn't counterfeiters just continue to counterfeit the older bills?
It's incredible to me that as of the previous version of the $100 bill, that anyone would take the fake bills.
I worked at a bank for about 2 years and the quality of fake $100's I came across was NEVER any good to fool the bank, however, local businesses did not scrutinize it beyond the counterfeit marker (which is rarely indicative of the legitimacy of a bill).
Edit: I should note that every single fake, or suspected fake, would be sent out to the secret service. In the case where several bills would show up in a short period from local businesses, local police would be contacted as well (and of course demand to see the bills, which they never did).
I would imagine the only time it is important to stop a counterfeit bill is the first time its used, right? If the goal is to stop people from counterfeiting, at least.
Why would a state-level actor choose to counterfeit currency? "Nations have used counterfeiting as a means of warfare. The idea is to overflow the enemy's economy with fake bank notes, so that the real value of the money plummets. Great Britain did this during the American Revolutionary War to reduce the value of the Continental Dollar." On the other hand, this is probably not worth doing unless you can counterfeit at least a few percent of all the money in circulation...
Another reason that states would do it is if they are in a position like, say, North Korea, with little access to the currencies they need to buy the items they would like to buy from abroad due to international sanctions. "There have been two primary reasons for [North Korea's alleged] counterfeiting: the first is to wage economic warfare against the United States,[2] and secondly, to help ease North Korea's domestic economic problems.[12]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%27s_illicit_activi...
Well, thanks anyway for sending me down this k-hole of wikipedia articles about forgery...
>There are several security features, including fluorescent orange ink, a metal strip and, like government-printed currencies, a measure that is kept secret from the public to further thwart forgery.
I suspect they won't be as successful at stopping forgery if for no other reason than the fact that if someone is unfamiliar with this "currency" they won't know it's security properties. (Especially one that's kept secret)
Years ago, I heard that the top industrial export from North Korea was counterfeit $100 bills. When traveling in the surrounding countries, people treat that denomination with more skepticism as you get closer to North Korea. Special paper-protecting and flaw-spotting techniques that I have never seen inside the USA.
Well, the slow destruction of the distinctive, historical, and elegant appearance of the American currency is almost complete. Soon it will look like just about every other nation's money: rainbow colored and disordered.
The US has worked to prevent this. I remember as a kid in the middle east (a time/place where everything was in cash) seeing commercials from the US that said, in effect: "We are printing new 100$ bills. The old ones will be good _forever_. Don't fall for scams selling new bills for old."
Even at the time I thought those commercials came from a good place. Being a world currency sometimes going the extra mile to protect not just its value or exchange rate, but the reputation of its physical manifestation.
And the currency itself has numerous security features to detect counterfeits: https://carnation-inc.com/blogs/money-handling-blog/100-bill...
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