buy, loads the paper into his color ink-jet printer, and prints out bills that look great. He could pass them anywhere. So he goes to the school cafeteria, buys his friends lunch, and the cashier doesn't bat an eye. He takes a trip to the mall, and no one says a word. So he starts printing them all the time, and his parents no longer need to give him an allowance. He can give his parents an allowance.
Now, if your kid is more of a purist, he can try this scam. Go into a bank and ask to buy five hundred one-dollar bills. If the teller questions him about why he needs all of those singles, he can say, "Well, it's not your business, but if you really want to know, our school has a school project and they take money at the commissary, and we need change." He goes home and washes the bills in a washing machine with a bleach eradicator that washes all the ink off so they come out as blank bills. He scans a twenty-dollar bill, puts the bleached bills in the printer, and ink-jets twenties. Now he's got real currency with inflated amounts on them. It's a trick that started in Colombia and has been imported here.
Another common type of counterfeit bill is the paste-up bill. This is where a dollar bill is converted into, say, a twenty-dollar bill or a five into a fifty or a ten into a hundred. Most commonly, however, the paste-up artist converts ones into twenties, because they're easiest to pass. The paste-up artist never changes the back of the bill, only the front. And all he changes are the denominations in the corners. The giveaway is that George Washington is still staring out from the center instead of Andrew Jackson, and there's a one written across the seal. So it's worth paying attention to who's in the center when someone gives you a twenty-dollar bill.
One more thing kids love to do is copy five-dollar bills. They take the bills to a local copy shop. They place them on the machine and copy them right onto white bond paper. They only copy the front. They don't bother with the back. Then they cut out the copies and go to the video arcade, the laundromat, or the car wash, or anywhere that has a change machine. All change machines work on the same principle. Inside the machine is an optical scanner, and it only scans one side. If a facsimile is within 5 percent tolerance, it goes through every time, and these copies make the cut.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE
The way we fight technology is with technology. Real money has always had its protective features that have made counterfeiting something of a challenge. Genuine money is printed, then engraved, then intaglio engraved, which gives it depth. The intaglio engraving is what makes it tough to duplicate. On real money, the portrait of the famous American in the middle looks three-dimensional. The eye sockets look sunken, the hairline recedes. This is three-dimensional engraving. On a counterfeit bill, these items appear flat, like a picture in a newspaper or a magazine. The real bills are printed on special paper made under government control; it's fibrous and strong, and red and blue fibers are visible. Over the Treasury seal are tiny hash marks which make up the word or number of the bill's denomination. On real money, you should be able to read the words on the seal clearly. Even on the best counterfeit bill, the hash marks become bars, making it difficult to discern the words of the seal.
But technology has overwhelmed these safeguards, and so the government has battled back with a new round of technology. In 1996, for the first time in seventy-two years, the government made changes in the currency. Over the last few years, these new bills have been introduced with additional security features. Then the government said, don't worry, we won't change them again for another twenty-five years. Actually, they'll be changing them in 2003 to multicolored bills with additional safeguards, because technology has already found ways to defeat them.
The new bill is actually not a bad bill, but the problem is that the people who take it have no idea what to look for in order to gauge whether it's real or fake. Management hasn't taken the time to teach them. What management prefers to do is go out and buy them a cheap one-dollar pen. It