Robot Monkeys

From the banging-around-the-hdd-for-eight-months-department…

There are near perfect counterfeit bills floating around the world. You may even have one right now (assuming of course, you’re like my dad and carry bills in excess of $20). They have the same paper, watermarks, mylar strip, uv ink, microprint, and optical variable ink. Not only that, but the bills are constantly updated, and aren’t produced in quantity. Only $50 million have been seized in 18 years, and that’s not enough to make the runs profitable.

The rumor was that North Korea was behind the bills, but they can’t be because, they don’t have the ink, and there’s questions about whether than can even do the printing. (Of course that’s not stopping the Bush Administration from saying North Korea is behind it.)

The really weird thing? They’re not perfect. They’re intentionally flawed.

So what’s going on here? There are several questions here. First, who is capable of doing this? Printing and Engraving gets the ink from Swiss Sicpa. The paper comes from Crane & Co., and I believe that Crane & Co is legally forbidden to sell the paper to anyone other than the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, so that makes it unlikely that they are the source of the paper. It’s possible that someone is making a copy of the paper.

The bigger question is of course, is that if you could make super accurate counterfeits, then why would you make them flawed? That’s more interesting. The only reason why I could think of why you would want copies that accurately replicate all the anticounterfeit devices, but then add flaws in typically unexamined parts, is to mark them. Someone wants to be able to identify these bills later. The only reason I can think you would want to do this is a track them.

So who could be behind this? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t count out the CIA. They have the means, the presses at Printing and Engraving, the question is the motive? That I don’t know, but I could easily see distributing US currency and tracking it as part some standard intelligence gathering tool, or at least some CIA operating manual. So why is the ironically named Secret Service talking about this? Easy. They don’t need to know, and the fact that the US Government is investigating this, deflects suspicion away from the the US Government.

Just sayin’.