Heh… it’s probably old hat to most of you that newer scanners, printers and software will barf if you try to use them to forge a banknote, but I only found out today… not by trying to artificially inflate my beer fund, I hasten to add. I find it hard to believe that your average master forger is going to be relying on an inkjet and a copy of Photoshop anyway, but I suppose some people get away with it…
4 thoughts on “Licence to (not) print money”
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I was surprised too, when I first heard of this limitation: it’s weird for me because I’m Italian, and the Italian Lira banknotes (before) and the Euro banknotes (now) always had so much more details, colors, and sizes with respect to US Dollars, and nobody would really be fooled by a computer printed one…
Nonetheless, even Euros have the “copy protection”, that consists in 5 little circles printed in UV reactive paint in various points of the banknote.
I guess if you could use this method to protect arbitrary sheets of paper 🙂
note that euro bank notes have a copyright statement printed on them…
> I find it hard to believe that your average master forger is
> going to be relying on an inkjet and a copy of Photoshop
> anyway.
Yeah especially when there are several excellent open source alternatives available :-p
There actually was something in the news overhere in .nl last week about a family printing notes using a simple printer. They got away with in quite alot of shops..