Press Used To Print Millions of US Banknotes Seized In Quebec 398
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Royal Mounted Police report: An offset printing press used to manufacture counterfeit $20 banknotes was seized by the RCMP and US Secret Service. This significant seizure was made earlier today in the Trois-Rivières area. The authorities had been looking for this offset press for several years. A large quantity of paper was also seized by police, that could have been used by the counterfeiters to manufacture from $40-$200 million. The very high quality counterfeit notes were virtually undetectable to the naked eye. Some of the features they had were uncommon, including the type of paper used, which was especially made with a Jackson watermark and a dark vertical stripe imitating the security thread found in authentic notes."
How they were detected (Score:5, Funny)
They were printed in both English and French, to avoid breaking Canadian bilingualism laws.
Re:How they were detected (Score:5, Funny)
The "In God We Trust, eh?" was another tip-off.
Re:How they were detected (Score:4, Funny)
The final straw that gave them away was that they were trying to print $100 bills, but they came off the press as $89.95 bills.
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Did a moose piss in your poutine this morning, or are you always such an asshole?
If you think the world needs some better Canada jokes, then how about supplying a few yourself.
Re:How they were detected (Score:5, Funny)
Canada certainly DOES deserve some better jokes, however I don't think the case for new and funnier jokes should come at the expense of any of the other 50 states. North Dakota and Missouri are also candidates for better representation.
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Thank you Jeremiah! Next up... Maurice Bolyer - Canada's King of the Banjo! [youtube.com]
Re:How they were detected (Score:5, Insightful)
Big bad counterfeiters! 200 Mil!
I guess they're right. The best way to illegally make money is to own a bank.
HSBC alone, payed out 2 BILLION in just fines, for laundering drug cartel money. And were glad to do it! 2 Bil was only 5 weeks of it's annual profits. Heck, the man responsible at HSBC, Gulliver, got a personal windfall 2 Million in BONUS!
So, if there are "BIG PENALTIES" for these Canadian operators, it's only to keep the ankle-biters off of the big banks' turf.
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If those are the best Canadian jokes you can come up with, the American sense humour must have deteriorated even further than Hollywood's latest attempts at comedy had suggested.
Ah, yeah...
That movie "Lone Survivor"..? That wasn't really suppose to be a comedy.
Re:How they were detected (Score:5, Funny)
They were printed in both English and French, to avoid breaking Canadian bilingualism laws.
Actually, they weren't. Which is the *real* reason why the Quebec police busted them.
Go after the real thieves lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Buddy, Can You Spare a Dolla (Score:5, Funny)
If you suspect you have government printed currency, you should send it to me, flyneye.
I will inspect it for bugs, flaws and make sure it works.
Bulk, no problem, will pay shipping fees or postage for large amounts.
Be safe, be sure, send your money to flyneye.
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You're a bug though. :P
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Hello, I am Janet Yeltzin, the current director of the federal reserve. I require to enact quantitative Easingwhich means placing several hundred million dollars in your bank account, with a negative real interest rate, and no specific date of repayment. In exchange for this, you must make comforting noises about loaning it out to others, to stimulate the economy.please forward your bank serial numbers, and the accoount IDs into which you wish each tranche to be placed.
In case you are wondering about the ur
learn proper economics please (Score:3, Informative)
Now if we could just stop our government from printing themselves money.
Why?
When interest rates are at 0%, and the politicians can't be bother inducing demand via stimulus spending/fiscal policy, the only way left to get the economy going is monetary policy. The Japanese have had 0% interest rates for decades, and have printed money a lot as well, and they've had deflation.
In science you pick the model which makes accurate predictions. The Austrians, gold bugs, and folks from the Chicago school of thought have been yammering on about inflation for years. The Keynesians (IS-LM f
Re:learn proper economics please (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if being able to diagnose a disease means you know how to cure it.
If we're all Keynesians, why aren't we all breaking windows to improve the economy? The theory is utterly stupid EVEN IN THEORY, much less in application.
Increasing money supply doesn't magically make people want to consume, all it really does is threaten blackmail to people "stupid" enough to try to save money.
Keynes vs Hayek rap battle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] "Fear the Boom and Bust"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] "Fight of the Century"
Keynes was, like Freud, a brilliant man whose observations are seminal to our understanding of his field, but who was in many ways overwhelmingly wrong.
I'll take Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, and ultimately Friedrich Hayek over JMK, thanks
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There are far more examples of central banks doing things to hurt the economy than there are of them helping it. It would be one thing if they ONLY protected us against inflation by adjusting the interest rate/money supply, but because they are run by politics most often, they feel pressure and medal in things they certainly should not. The fed can do nothing more than add a splint, the economy must heal itself just like a broken leg. What the fed does now is similar to what "Sports medicine" does to get mi
Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there's China, its inflation rate skyrocketed into hyperinflation several times during the recent 30 years, yet they've had double-digit growth for about as long as that.
Oh, and inflation primarily hurts 1%-ers because they have to actually invest their capital in risky businesses (work!) rather than sit back and enjoy risk-free rent. For a general worker a mild inflation is a plus, because it erodes the debts (mortgage!) over time.
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Nope. US Fed did what is required from the start, so the recession in the US turned out to be far more shallow than in Europe (where the ECB blundered for several years). In Japan it's the contrast is even more stark - after a decade of slow stagnation and deflation (or near-deflation) they started growing almost immediately after the central bank and the government decided to be 'irresponsible'.
And yet Australia, which gave cash to tax payers instead of bank managers, did even better. But even though Australia completely avoided a technical recession, all they have done is delay the inevitable.
When you start modelling money and debt [debtdeflation.com], global economies still look very sick indeed.
Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also correct that purely monetary policy can do little in case of liquidity traps - a loose monetary policy is necessary to get out of liquidity trap, but by itself it can't really affect investment and demand levels.
Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. US Fed did what is required from the start, so the recession in the US turned out to be far more shallow than in Europe (where the ECB blundered for several years). In Japan it's the contrast is even more stark - after a decade of slow stagnation and deflation (or near-deflation) they started growing almost immediately after the central bank and the government decided to be 'irresponsible'.
And yet Australia, which gave cash to tax payers instead of bank managers, did even better. But even though Australia completely avoided a technical recession, all they have done is delay the inevitable.
The $900 payout to people who earned less than A$90,000 didn't stop the recession in Australia. In fact nothing did. We had one, but we recovered in less than 12 months because of sensible banking regulations which meant none of our major banks needed public money. That combined with a sensible economic policy (which has remained virtually unchanged since the early 90's) and low levels of public debt meant that we rode out the GFC in a very short time.
The $900 "stimulus" was about boosting consumer confidence, which it did for a very short time but it wasn't a real fix.
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Well, the recession was so short exactly because the payout helped - you can't expect such policy measures to act immediately. And no, tougher banking regulations were not the reason - Europe in general had similar regulations, yet they didn't help. Public debt also has no direct relation to recovery - Spain had very little public debt (and it was running surpluses for many years), for example.
Actually it didn't help in the long term. It was a short term fix that did nothing to address the fundamental problems (which was the fact if a banker in New York farts, the markets in Australia panic). It was a short term boost to sales which doesn't do anything in the long run (I kept my $900 in the bank). The US tried doing the same three times and it didn't help them.
Also, Europe did not have similar regulations, they may have had tougher regulations but they were the wrong regulations. Australian b
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The US tried doing the same three times and it didn't help them.
Three times? Wrong. There was only one direct stimulus and it was much smaller (around $300). It also doesn't matter what YOU did - in general people spent the money, so it helped to restart the stalled economy.
Also, Europe did not have similar regulations, they may have had tougher regulations but they were the wrong regulations. Australian banks had limits about how much they could lend vs how much they had in assets as well as rules on how much they had to keep in liquid assets (again relative to how much they could lend) which made the conditions that created the sub prime crisis in the US and Europe impossible to have in Australia.
[citation needed]
The reason that Australia went through a brief period of recession is because our market is interdependent on other markets (most notably the US market) so when things went belly up there, it had a huge effect here. But because the same conditions weren't replicated here, nor in China we were able to recover very quickly.
Do you have any model that can explain this?
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Then there's China, its inflation rate skyrocketed into hyperinflation several times during the recent 30 years, yet they've had double-digit growth for about as long as that.
China's rapid economic growth began in 1978 when they began to unscrew the economy by introducing market reforms.
China's economic miracle [bbc.co.uk]
The seeds of China's rapid economic growth since the 1990s were first planted back in 1978 when the Communist Party started to introduce capitalist market principles, initially in the agricultural sector.
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Oh, and inflation primarily hurts 1%-ers
This is absolutely false. The Fed essentially bailed out Wall Street and gifted the 1% in the range of trillions of dollars via zero interest. Have you gotten a 0% loan from the bank lately? The Fed essentially funded the stock market would rise, which the 1%'ers are piled into, enriching them even more, while pretty much none of the lower income Americans were able to participate in. What are corporations doing with their record profits? Stock buybacks. That money isn't going into hiring people.
Inflation h
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How is this marked insightful when all the points made are the exact opposite of reality?
Because it fellates the power class with their woo-woo economics. He champions the ruin of local economies by calling a net transfer of wealth to Wall Street "putting the money to work" (as if local business loans by local banks was *a bad thing*) and makes the base assumption that wages keep up with inflation [shadowstats.com] while ignoring massive unemployment [shadowstats.com], probably by using politically-manipulated data.
Because, everybody knows t
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Mod parent up, +1 Funny: Japan's qualitative Easing works?!?!??
A lost decade, with no growth, now being stretched to TWO decades with no growth, and you call that working?
That quantitative Easing, those bailouts, are exactly what causes the disasters. So of course they need more of it, because it is clear that they never learned their lesson.
And yes, it appears we need another round of Tarp too. The Fed's holding of worthless promisory notes, never again to be marked to market, with no date of repayment, is
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It's roundabout taxation and debt relief for a government too grid locked to supply those with fiscal means.
It has some unfortunate side effects, allowing interest rates to rise would as well though ... sure a deep enough deflationary bust can clear the US debt overhang, I'm betting fascist would come to power before it runs it's course though because it's not going to be pretty.
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Are you sure your 100 is not reduced 5% due to supply/demand curves, etc?
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So long as inflation is slow and predictable, it won't make your money worth less (again, unless you store it under your mattress).
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Bank of america money market savings account rates 0.03% - 0.07% (depeding on how much you have in your account).
So while you are 0.07% better off not keeping your money under the mattress it certainly is not growing at the rate of inflation.
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Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:5, Informative)
It steals nothing. My $100 in the bank is worth $105 after the fed increases the money supply 5%. My house goes from $200,000 to 210,000, again, matching the inflation.
What? Inflation makes your buying power less not more. The house may go up in (numeric) value, but you $100 in the bank is worth less now since it's not worth as much in actual exchange for goods and services.
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Prices go up 5%, interest/investment pays me 5%, so I lose nothing. Why are you hoarding cash under your mattress?
The value of your home is effected my the local housing market much more than the national inflation rate -- which is why we had the housing bubble screw so many people. Also, keep in mind the value of your home will be negatively impacted over time, because your house is getting older and maintenance costs will increase on it, better technology for utilities and energy efficiency in newer homes, ect.
The bank account issue is exactly as I said it. The money left in the bank (assuming "bank" means deposit ac
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Prices go up 5% or the value of your money goes down 5%.
So you agree with me, and are just arguing the return on investment of banked money. Got it. Thanks for your agreement and vote of confidence.
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Most investments do NOT pay 5% interest (this isn't the late 90s anymore, 2% is good!).
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Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:4, Insightful)
The trick is to gain assets greater than your assets.
Translation: The trick is to be born into enough money to make large investments with large returns.
Borrow $1,000,000 and buy 4 $250,000 houses
Translation: I am disconnected from the financial reality of the average working-class citizen.
Sell them in 10 years and you beat inflation, even after inflation and interest.
Translation: Use hard assets, not soft assets, in order to beat inflation.
Of course, to get $1,000,000 in loans, you have to already have money. But I do have enough to borrow to beat inflation.
Translation: You need to be rich like me in order to get rich like me.
If someone inflates against me, I raise rents on my tenants. Problem solved.
Translation: I solve my problems by screwing over the guy who has less initial resources and is thus less able to invest and be rich like me. Profit!
I'm also earning 10% per year (average over 20 years) in the market with retirement and investments. And, of course, being in the top 10% of wage earners, I pay less than 10% of my income as federal income tax (and less than 20% in total taxes, summing all property, sales, state, local and federal taxes). My tax rate should be 3x what it is, but I'm happy to use the system to my benefit. Even if the system is broken.
Translation: I make WAY more money than you and I pay less in taxes than you as a function of income. I should pay 3x as much, but I'm happy to screw the next guy over, who doesn't have enough money to play games with the loopholes or make very large investments.
Do you ever listen to yourself? Do you have ANY idea how much like a stuck up asshole, totally disconnected from the economic reality of the average citizen you sound? By your own admissions and details, you need a sizable amount of money just to play your game in the first place!
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I should like to know more about the magical bank where you keep your money.
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But it's what happens next that really hurts. If the Fed prints $100, it ends up on deposit in a bank somewhere. That bank can now lend $90 to someone, who deposits it in another bank. That bank can now lend $81... etc. Less than 0.5% of the "money" in circulation was ever actually issued by the Fed; the rest was created out of thin a
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You're confused - it's the BANKS that 'print' money into existence.
Commerical banks create pseudeo-money.
When you deposit "real" money from the government or central bank in a commercial bank account the bank keeps a certain ammount of it in reseve (either by stashing it in a vault or depositing it at the central bank) and loans out the rest. But you still effectively have the money you deposited so your bank balance is psuedo-money.
The ammount of such psuedo-money in the system is much greater than the ammount of "real money" but the government and central bank (the exis
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You're confused - it's the BANKS that 'print' money into existence.
Commerical banks create pseudeo-money.
When you deposit "real" money from the government or central bank in a commercial bank account the bank keeps a certain ammount of it in reseve (either by stashing it in a vault or depositing it at the central bank) and loans out the rest. But you still effectively have the money you deposited so your bank balance is psuedo-money.
The ammount of such psuedo-money in the system is much greater than the ammount of "real money" but the government and central bank (the existance of which is ultimately at the whim of the government) control the ammount of real money and the reserve requirements placed on banks and thus indirectly control the ammount of pseudo-money the commercial banks can create.
They all create the same money, there is no pseudo-money. When you get a loan from a bank, that bank creates the money they lend you on the spot. It does not come out of anyone's account, or even from the bank's money. It is new money, created for you based on your willingness to pay, or the real value of physical collateral you put up. The Federal Reserve does the same thing when they buy Treasury bonds. They create that money on the spot to buy the bonds and increase the money supply. So there is no
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Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:5, Informative)
My left hand borrows money from the future and passes them to my right hand which gives you cash. What does that really look like to the rest of the world in practice?
Or how about this, I lend 9 trillion dollars "from the future" to my friends at below market interest rates. My friends make a few millions or even billions with it and pay me back in full (can't be that hard - it's below market rates after all). So how's that not printing money? It may not be printing trillions but it's printing millions or billions.
plastics the new paper (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:plastics the new paper (Score:4, Interesting)
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*Paper* money will survive washing machines.
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*Paper* money will survive washing machines.
Technically US banknotes are made out of cloth more than paper.
But the GP has a very good point about durability. Polymer banknotes last up to 4 times so the reserve bank (RBA) has to print fewer notes (one of the RBA's jobs is destroying old notes and replacing them with new ones).
Re: plastics the new paper (Score:3, Funny)
Duh... Money laundering.
Re:plastics the new paper (Score:5, Informative)
The Australians license the polymer process to a lot of countries (including Canada) and an offshoot of the Australian Reserve Bank actually prints polymer notes for about 30 countries directly including Mexico.
Re:plastics the new paper (Score:5, Informative)
switch to australian made notes, i'd like to see them try and replicate those notes!
Yes, I've advocated the US switching to Aussie plastic ever since my first experience with it when I visited Oz in 1995. Canada is now doing it and Mexico has been using it for several years. Even the damn Romanians are using it! The polymer money has its detractors (it's slippery and doesn't fold nicely unless you put a book on the fold for a month and then you can't get the fold out) but it's pretty much damn impossible to counterfeit unless you're a government. And I suspect even the North Koreans will have trouble with it since I have no doubt the Aussies will ever license the technology to them for obvious reasons.
Re:plastics the new paper (Score:5, Informative)
Canada makes polymer bills. The first polymer bill produced was the $100 CAD. Not too long after it was released, counterfeits were reported. This is a CBC story from May 2013. Too bad, for the longest time $100 and $50 paper bills weren't accepted at retail even if legal tender for fear it was counterfeit. Hopefully this doesn't happen with the new polymer bills.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com... [theglobeandmail.com]
How is this any different from Fed practice? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fed doesn't even bother with the paper - just pushes some buttons, and *magically* $4 billion pops out into the system *every day.*
Except they call it Quantitative Easing instead of its actual name, counterfeiting. Cuz they're economists, you know.
Re:How is this any different from Fed practice? (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense!
They only create TWO billion a day.
Re:How is this any different from Fed practice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Money is a COMMODITY that is used as a medium of exchange. You do realize that hand-sized pieces of paper are a valuable commodity, don't you? The day you run out, you will eat with only your right hand.
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It is illogical to suggest that a government can counterfeit money.
It is overbroad to suggest that it is illogical to suggest that a government can counterfeit money. See North Korea vs. United States. Perhaps you meant it's illogical to suggest that a government can counterfeit its own money? Even then, a government might choose to counterfeit their own money (poorly, perhaps) to discredit another nation (false flag attack). That is a contrived scenario, but meant to illustrate your comment was far too broadly stated.
Where's the nerd in this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Couple of criminals bested by another lot of criminals.
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In addition, remember that one of the few scientifically sound principles that predates Galileo was a result of the detection of counterfeiting. The story goes that King Heron wanted to make a crown from a certain amount of pure gold, or a s pure as he could get. The
Are they embossed? (Score:2)
The majority of counterfeit bills aren't embossed. It's one of the easiest tips offs. Ink lays on top of genuine bills making them easy to feel the difference.
Re:Are they embossed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fancy heavy-weight offset printer, so yes. The press is what enables that difference, and this is one of those presses. Who gets to even buy these presses if quite tightly controlled. The fact that authorities spent years looking for it meant that its purchase was very carefully done and it was probably disassembled and moved after initial delivery. A difficult and expensive operation, but presumably the years it was in operation paid for it.
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Are you talking about Canada or the USA?
To a naive person (me), it would seem that (in the USA) controlling who can buy a printing press would fall foul of the First Amendment. Tracking I can see, but controlling? It looks like the top of a very slipperly slope, since one could find an illegal use for just about any type of press.
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A very special type of press is needed for a convincing fake. Good paper money is printed with an 8-color press, which are really only used to print currency and Magic cards. Dunno if the seized press used the same process, or they were just clever in some way. In any case, the secret service probably keeps track of the few presses capable of printing convincing fakes.
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The First Amendment is just a guideline, look at the various decisions of the Supreme Court over the years. If the courts took the First seriously your country or Constitution would be much different. Even having a standing army would be next impossible as the UMC is a law passed by Congress which limits soldiers rights to talk back to officers amongst other things such as national security.
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What's spooky is, if they really only printed 40 M to 200 M in bills in that time, their start up costs probably come to a significant fraction of total profits, and if they had been caught only two or three months into the operation, they could have actually taken a loss.
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The process is called intaglio [wikipedia.org].
It's a plot (Score:2)
Since US currency is "faith based"... (Score:2)
what's wrong with the odd counterfeiter making high quality fakes, just as long as we all (not just we in the US, but everywhere that US currency is circulated) share in the mutual hallucination?
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Because the game is all about who gets to have the money, not how good the money is. If counterfeiting were legal, peons could print their way to financial independence, and we can't be havin' with that. Any mechanism by which large numbers of the population can escape from debt will be carefully stamped out, no matter what it is. Counterfeit printing is only one of many victims of this policy.
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Like most of lawful killing and other acts violence, wiretapping, extortion, currency printing, and a multitude of other areas... the government has granted themselves a near monopoly on such things.
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I'm willing to honor my promises.
Promise to do what? It's not a commodity-based currency, so it's not as if anyone will be walking up to a bank and demanding gold for their dollars.
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The crooks printed more than a couple of million dollars worth. Still, the government could print $40 million to $200 million less in total for the year, and if they got that number near enough to what the criminals actually printed, then the crime has actually done no damage to the financial system, not contributed to inflation risk, and actually saved the US government some operating costs.
Someone actually is using a printing press? (Score:4, Insightful)
When I first read this story I was amazed to read that someone was still using a printing press to print phony money. I thought only the North Koreans did that because their fakes are printed using the intaglio printing method, the same one used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing to print American money. You're not going to get that from an offset press.
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You're not going to get that from an offset press.
No, but you'd be surprised how many Americans don't know even the basic security features of their money. Indeed, if a bill looks and feels right at a first glance, few enough will question its authenticity and the counterfeiters rely upon this fact. It also doesn't help that the most common counterfeit detection method employed by small businesses, the currency marker pen, is easily defeated with the right sort of non-banknote paper and some dried hairspray. This is common knowledge now, at least online an
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Yet nobody is going to bust the North Koreans. Defeat their military is so easy that it should be a privately funded effort. Apple or Google will have enough cash to form a private military that can annex NK within a week and turn it into a first single corporate-run nation-state.
undetectable to the naked eye (Score:3, Insightful)
And ultimately, that is all you really need to do. Fool the guy at the store counter, which isn't all that hard.
Once it gets back to the bank and is detected, you are long gone.
Re:undetectable to the naked eye (Score:4, Insightful)
Once it gets back to the bank and is detected, you are long gone.
Hahahahahaha detected at the bank hahahahaha.
People get counterfeit twenties out of ATMs all the time.
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Counterfeit money like this isn't used to buy a soda at a gas station. They produce it in bulk and it generally gets used overseas in currency exchanges, where they ultimately launder the fake stuff into real stuff.
*then* they go buy a soda at a gas station.
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Counterfeit money like this isn't used to buy a soda at a gas station. They produce it in bulk and it generally gets used overseas in currency exchanges, where they ultimately launder the fake stuff into real stuff.
*then* they go buy a soda at a gas station.
maybe this happens on a one-off basis with some extremely under the radar places, but this would be an insane method to attempt to unload any more than a hundred thousand.
as the marginal cost for fake money is almost zero, they are likely converting into tangible goods that can be resold for clean money.
a team could easily buy $250k worth of precious metals / high end electronics at flea markets or craigslist in a weekend in NYC
Where's Perry, eh? (Score:2)
So someone is trying to take over le Trois-Rivières area? with a counterfeitprinterantor, eh?
Did anyone spot an ornithorynque wearing a fedora and assisting the Mounties?
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Not true!
Getting cocaine to rub over the bills to enhance their authenticity requires hanging out in some dodgy neighbourhoods. :P
That is what stops me from doing it.
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Not true!
Getting cocaine to rub over the bills to enhance their authenticity requires hanging out in some dodgy neighbourhoods. :P
That is what stops me from doing it.
If you don't hang out in these neighborhoods, a sincere good luck in the Muhhamad/mountain dillema (avoiding them coming in and hanging you out).
Its cotton cloth, not paper (Score:2)
They just call it paper. The other stuff is open for discussion.
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No it's not ordinary paper it's actually cotton cloth. Actually it's all quite interesting, visiting Crane paper in Dalton Mass is neat afternoon.
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That's right, if you get stuck with a fake 50, you lose unless you can successfully pawn it off on a small store that doesn't check carefully.
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Bitcoin sucks. See stories of millions of stolen bitcoins posted here on Slashdot only weeks ago. Not that its a bad idea outright, just that bitcoin is far from a perfect implementation of a crypo currencey, and fan boys like you keep touting it like the end all be all solution. It is NOT imunne to exploitation and theft.
Are you seriously trying to blame the currency/protocol for exploitation and theft as though to imply that fiat currency is somehow immune to those things? People who have had bitcoin stolen have done so by leaving themselves vulnerable through things such as poor anti-virus, poor password practices, and general ignorance of scams. This is not a flaw in bitcoin (either the currency or the protocol), it's a lack of education for the end user. This is almost identical to putting a hundred dollar bill (fiat cu
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I've never had money stolen out of a bank account. Of course, bitcoins will never be mainstream unless I can have a BTC-denominated savings account and credit card(at which point central banks control the BTC money supply, so why bother?).
BTC and money creation policy (Score:2)
at which point central banks control the BTC money supply, so why bother?
In that world, someone running bitcoin running software needs to be illegal, but that law preventing uncontrolled money creation would be impossible to enforce.
This is the biggest problem with crypto currencies IMO: money creation policy should be a political question, not a technical one.
faking crypto currency (Score:2)
What happens when (not if) someone figures out how to counterfeit [a crypto currency]?
It may be already the case, who knows?
Re: (Score:2)
Likely the Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked the Secret Service (the experts in dealing with counterfeit US currency) for help with the raid.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
They're also my municipal and provincial police force so they're more then just the equivalent of the FBI.