Little tricks of counterfeiters..

Little tricks of counterfeiters..

Little tricks of counterfeiters.

Shaposhnikov Yu.I.

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When talking about counterfeit banknotes, we can't help but mention how counterfeiters imitate watermarks. There aren't many ways, but some of them are quite exotic. Once we got our hands on a banknote that was made rather poorly, but when we split it, it turned out that it was glued together from three sheets of paper. Moreover, on the inner sheet, a pattern imitating watermarks was applied with a white substance similar to sealant. The banknote turned out to be thick to the touch and didn't look much like the original.

Genuine and counterfeit watermarks on banknotes 100 rubles
Genuine	Fake
The counterfeit watermark is applied to the back of the banknote with a white substance. The imitation is clearly visible in oblique light on the back of the banknote.

The usual way to imitate a watermark is embossing. By thinning individual sections of the paper, it becomes more transparent. The resulting image looks like a watermark when held up to the light, but when the banknote is directly examined on the paper, the clear boundaries of the watermark are visible, unlike a real watermark, which has blurred boundaries. Such a «watermark» is clearly visible and immediately catches the eye on a counterfeit banknote.

Genuine and fake watermarks on banknotes 100 US dollars
Genuine	Fake
The counterfeit watermark is applied to the back of the banknote with a substance similar in color to the color of the paper. The outline of the counterfeit watermark very remotely resembles the genuine watermark.

Almost as often, criminals use various substances (for example, «Stroke» to cover up mistakes in printed text) to imitate a watermark, from pale gray to white, which are applied to the paper using a specially made stamp that replicates the image of a genuine watermark, or are drawn by hand (see Fig. 68 and 69). Usually, a banknote is stamped on the back side. The calculation is apparently based on the fact that a person usually checks a banknote for authenticity by first looking at its front side, and then looking for a watermark on the front side when holding it up to the light. If you turn such a banknote over to the back, the counterfeit becomes obvious, since it is clearly visible in oblique rays of light even at arm's length.

Good imitation of security hairs is extremely rare. Usually the images of security hairs are transferred to the scanned image and reproduced during printing together with the general motif of the banknote. Security hairs from their images are easy to distinguish even for a person with not very good eyesight.

Security strips on genuine and counterfeit US $100 bills of 1996 issue
Genuine	Fake
On a counterfeit banknote, the stripe printed on a thin strip of paper stands out clearly against the background of the banknote paper; on a genuine banknote, it is practically invisible.

Sometimes hairs are drawn onto the paper using special markers, the dye of which glows in UV light. In this case, the «hairs» are thick, sparse, and located on the surface of the paper. In rare cases, hairs are extracted in small quantities from genuine banknotes and then glued to counterfeits. Such hairs are easily separated from the paper and there are few of them.

When talking about the methods of counterfeiting various security features of banknotes, it should be noted that the author has never come across a counterfeit dollar banknote that lacked a security strip (if the year of issue of the banknote provided for its presence), which cannot be said about counterfeit Russian rubles.

On counterfeit ruble notes, the imitation of the security strip is usually simple. Very often, it is simply a strip of paper glued to the back. The main motif of the note is printed on top of the glued strip. Such a strip can usually be easily separated from the note. Counterfeits are also often found on which the strip is applied with a gray-white substance. In both cases, this security element looks like a dark strip when held up to the light, on which no inscriptions are visible.

There are many popular ways to distinguish genuine US dollars from counterfeit ones. Most of them belong to the same category as the methods described by Gogol on how to distinguish an ordinary woman from a witch. For example, there is an opinion that if you fold a $100 bill in half, the fold line should pass through the president's right eye! Most people identify a fake by touch, determining the quality of the paper. The most knowledgeable specialists check the roughness of the president's jacket and the convexity of the inscription «THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA» by touch. We remind readers that these elements of the images made using intaglio printing should be easy to feel. Counterfeiters know this, so they use various tricks to create tactile sensations — they press through paper, etc.

Now that our dear readers have become familiar with the methods and tricks of counterfeiters, we will try to tell you how not to become their victims. The scheme for identifying counterfeit banknotes that we offer will help you to identify a counterfeit with sufficient confidence and avoid the troubles associated with receiving it.