Does anyone else have difficulties reading articles written this way - structured as Hollywood movies, with artificially built-up suspense and all? I feel patronized all the time, trying to get to the "meat" of the article, just finding "next page" link instead.
Good at making counterfeits, bad at making counterfeiting work.<p>Saw a trashy Discovery channel doc on counterfeiters. They printed using laser printers, and had a good process for aging the money. That was all that was needed... people just don't look that closely at money most of the time. They got away with it for years, even though they were pretty foolish (spent their own fakes, used the same spot every time to print money, etc.)<p>I can't tell if all that means there are probably smart people getting away with it constantly because they don't slip up in these dumb ways?
Never ever do this, esp in the US, even as a joke. I know of cases in my college where students counterfeited $20 bills as a drunk joke: what they found out is that irrespective of the amount federal agents and the goddam CIA got involved and they got persecuted to the maximum degree. My prof was called as an expert witness in the case.
TL;DR version: an after-the-fact account of how a man counterfeited millions all in the pursuit of "art". It makes for a romantic story, if nothing else -- although it certainly is not as sexy as the Leonardo DiCaprio/Tom Hanks <i>Catch Me If You Can</i> version.
I am amazed that paper banknotes have remained even vaguely counterfeit-resistant for so long. It seems like a very difficult problem, given modern technology; the capital costs of an intaglio press and great plates are high, but some kind of CNC milling should be able to produce equivalents at some point.<p>The NK superbills are still as far as I know the best quality.
I would also recommend the book <i>The Art of Making Money : The Story Of A Master Counterfeiter</i> by Jason Kerstan.<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105226799" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1052267...</a><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Making-Money-Counterfeiter/dp/B00403NGA4/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Making-Money-Counterfeiter/dp/...</a>
Back in 1993, an interesting documentary titled "Money Man" was made about currency artist J.S.G. Boggs. I don't know if it's still available.<p><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104909/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104909/</a><p>Here is a short YouTube clip from the film: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKSqzpj0Q" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKSqzpj0Q</a><p>Searching images for "jsg boggs art" returns some of his work.
In Australia, we've had polymer notes for 20 years, and counterfeiting is a thing of the past, to the point where I was puzzled as to why someone in the US was marking my $50 note during a purchase while visiting. Paper notes feel nice, but polymer lasts longer and are effectively counterfeit-proof.<p>Prior to this, we had a woeful $100 note, which was black and white with a bit of subtle colour. Pretty, but a dumb idea for currency. It was not unknown for folks to photocopy one, scrunch it up, and wander into a convenience store in the early hours when the staffer was tired...
If you read this article and have a halfway decent model of the world in your head, you will realize that police entrapment was the proximate cause of this real, talented artist low on his money becoming a counterfeiter: i.e. they made him do it, and he wouldn't have done it without them, and a judge released him early on probation for this reason (from the article).<p>But the damage was done. Still without any money, this genuine artist (who had "refused to do two Warhol copies, including forged signatures", always signing his own name instead on homage pieces) now had a criminal skill that had no other applications.<p>The fact is most people here have had a time in their life when they had unhoned skills (e.g. software/hardware hacking) that, if they only landed the right internship, would become very valuable. When the police are the proximate cause to creating this "lucky" internship (lucky in that the guy had 0 experience with it, or even interest for that matter) to create skills that have only a criminal market [1], something is very wrong.<p>It would be great if Freakonomics covered entrapment some time, as it's very insidious - on the surface it seeems that if you do it you "would have done it anyway", but this example shows pretty obviously that this isn't true in any form whatsoever.<p><i>[1] EDIT: or not even a criminal market, as the case may be:<p>"The problem was, Kuhl and his partners couldn’t make a deal with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying—a sale brokered by a criminal-minded former cop fell through, and another transaction with a supposed buyer in Majorca fizzled. That was when Becker and his colleagues decided to help things along by providing an attractive buyer themselves."</i>