Comment by rustcleaner 7 days ago
Besides, if I wanted to counterfeit I would [naïvely] get one of those tight tolerance watchmaker CNCs and have printing stamps made out of aluminum or something. Printing to paper in the usual home-office way seems to me an asinine method which is easily detected by most people who handle bills regularly.
That's a lot more work, skill and initial investment required than just trying to slap a dollar bill on a copier. Which means a lot fewer people will try, especially since the people with these skills can usually easily make enough, and possibly more, money through legitimate means.
There were people who did counterfeiting "right", down to getting real printing presses, suitable paper etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/frank-bourassa-on-how-he-cou... (it's strongly implied that he got away with 6 weeks in prison and likely got to keep a decent amount of the profit).
Ya gotta do what the cartels do: bleach out singles and print $100 on it so it feels right
Then there's needing to contend with possible serial number scanning occurring at automated stations and at financial institutions, cataloging the movements of specific bills, detecting clones (improbable or impossible physical note appearances), and detecting zombies (decommissioned/known-destroyed numbers, and numbers never emitted). Randomly generating numbers is likely to trip clone and zombie sensors at various surveillance points.
Bill scanning to verify authenticity is already occurring, why not record the fact Bank of xAI ATM #67387 tendered two Franklins with serial numbers $SERIALA and $SERIALB to you (verified by PIN and card, and possibly bolstered by Face ID incognito); maybe older systems only do the verification locally and lack OCR, but I'm positive new systems are plenty powerful enough to run pared down OCR on serial numbers... wait they have been doing it with cheques all these years with handwritten dollar values, so why not OCR serial numbers coming and going? You see? The net deepens. I probably can't suggest methods of washing this data without possibly committing some obscure crime, so I will leave you to your creative imaginations...
The point of these technologies is to stop the low hanging fruit and trace the source of ransom notes, leaked documents, and the like.
For counterfeiting, a technical person's first thought is: "how does the Bureau of Engraving and Printing actually do it?" and then they do that - and you nailed it: offset printing.
Laser printers and inkjets can't even remotely compare.