June 17th, 2016: Counterfeiting Money

[xoxoxoBruce]

Counterfeiting money isn't easy, thankfully. I saw a video how you can’t photocopy money, any countries money.
I remember unsuccessfully trying to Xerox US bills, 30-odd years ago, in an attempt to make gift wrapping paper,
so I’ve always accepted this being true. However, my curious inner child said, that was then and now ain’t.
I put a US bill in my HP 4570c flatbed scanner, opened the result in Photoshop, and it looks pretty damn good.
Not good enough to be passed for real, although in my recent experiences the cashiers barely look at the money
and at most hit it with the marker to see if the mark changes color, but I think that’s looking for the right paper.
I suspect your bookie or dealer would look more closely.

...........

The scan should never pass muster as real money but fine for film or TV show stacks of cash, just print a stack.
So I tell Photoshop to tell my Canon ip4500 to print one, and it lights up, whirrs, and clunks, but no printed image.
Hmm. Try again and watch the print queue. There it is, the printer grunts and rattles, it disappears from the queue.
All noise and drama but just faking it, no print.

Plan B… take a screen shot of the bill in photoshop, create a new image of the bill, try to print… not happening.
Save both images to my desk-top, create two more images by stripping “all properties and personal information”.
Try to print all four images with Windows, by-passing Photoshop, on the same Canon printer. It printed enlarged
images of really poor quality, but at life size it would stop printing after the very top of Ben’s head.

Bottom line is if you bleach out a $1 dollar bill and print a larger denomination, sooner or later a bank will flag it,
and the larger denomination the shorter the chain back to you. At best you might pass a couple hundreds before
being gunned down like a dog in the gutter, or 3 hots and a cot.
To me it seems pretty stupid, but YMMV.