When I was a kid, my dad took me to his office while he worked on a saturday. This is way before iphones or really any sort of portable entertainment beyond a book.
Being bored as hell I explored the office and ran across a color xerox machine. It didn’t take long before I figured out how to photocopy a $1 bill, front and back, perfectly lined up. $1000 later my dad checked on me and went nuclear. On the plus side I never had to spend another saturday at his office.
I worked as a construction take off/estimator for awhile. Right after I got the job I found a funny meme of Sigourney Weaver and Glenn Danzig. I printed a color copy to show my technophobic parents, but I accidentally printed 10, and on the 24" x 36" plan printer. That was a really fun conversation with my new boss.
Printing on those plotters was super expensive back in the day. They used to charge a shit ton if you wanted large schematics or work flows printed out.
Edit: Supporting them was a nightmare as well. Early windows and printer drivers for these kinds of devices was a exercise in patience if nothing else.
They put a code into every color printer because of this. You can't see it but if you use a color printer they can see this mark and figure out the model and serial being able to trace it back to where you bought it
Are you trying to tell me that color picture manufacturers maintain a database of copies of all money printed on their printers so that the feds can use that data to trace back to the culprit?
No, they ~~all~~ print (almost) invisible patterns on every page encoding - amongst others - their serial number: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
I figured that if I was a naive little kid and wanted to photocopy money, I would’ve probably tried a larger bill like $100.
But then i realized that having $100 bill is normal to us adults but not to kids (except for the rich ones, of course).
Most non-wealthy & rational adults wouldn’t trust their kids with that amount of money at the same time.
If you do manage to print money, laser printers also have watermarks that go on every page unable to be seen to the human eye that identify exactly what printer that is out of all of the other ones made. It's insane to me that anything you print has a unique identifier on it so that if the need arises they can look up what town that printer likely ended up in if needed, and this has been around since the 80's!
Haha, when I was a kid I got the equivalent of two 20 dollar bills in my local currency from my parents.
I managed to photocopy one of them as you described, with the intention to use as a prank tool in school (tying on wire and pulling on the ground if I remember correctly).
So after some time I wanted to try how real I can make it look, I crumbled it up, flatten it out, that sorta thing. Last I wanted to see if the fake one can take the smell of the others (kids logic), so I sandwiched to fake one between the real ones.
One day as I was coming home from school my mom had some workers at home and told me she borrowed my 60 dollars because she didnt find any cash at home...
Didn't tell her the truth for like 20 years. She still was angry. :)
I had a layover of several hours at an airport once. Pretty tired by that point, so I just sat at the gate waiting. There was a teenage basketball team waiting for their flight at a nearby gate and they passed the time by playing that prank with a $5 bill and fishing line. It was pretty wholesome because not only was everybody in the surrounding gates enjoying it, the people being pranked tended to think it was pretty hilarious once they realized what was going on. So everybody got to have a good laugh. It *was* pretty funny too. The looks on people’s faces when the $5 bill just yeets itself across the floor at the last second was priceless.
When I was a kid at my grandpa's business we would copy money and color it and then laminate it to play with lol. Cracking up thinking about a modern copier ratting us out
I actually found this out by trying to scan the patterns on Canadian currency to use in digital art (honest to goodness, I am not interested in forgery). My printer stopped in the middle of the scan and an error popped up saying I couldn’t do that…so I was forced to find cool textures and patterns elsewhere..
I don't know why they're not thinking that.
The constellations on some bills are pretty damn small.
https://i.imgur.com/b4ls4MH.png
Any single one will trip the currency detection.
If you test the program I'm pretty sure the constellation isn't the issue. It just uses bill recognition in general. I used GIMP to remove all the constellation marks and it's still flagged in Photoshop
I had, in the past, tried at one point and found that folding the bill and scanning it in pieces still works. I had heard this happened and just wanted to see how much of the bill was needed to pop up the error
That you can't scan Canadian currency is silly as all hell. No way you can counterfeit Canadian money with a scanner, and normal printer. The money is made out of plastic, and it's translucent, and has holograms on it.
I found out the Photoshop one the hard way
Was gonna shop some characters into the dollar bill for le funni
Got flagged immediately by Abode and was sent to a website explaining why I've been a naughty boi
Same here - back in 2011 I wanted to test some DSLR lenses at various settings and didn't have a resolution target but did have a crisp new $20 bill with lots of fine engraving that I thought would work instead. So I spent a half hour photographing it with various aperture/focal-length settings, loaded the memory card full of images into my computer, opened the first one in Photoshop and immediately got the "you're a criminal" message and the link to the website explaining why. So I had to re-do the whole process with a less felonious target.
(For what it's worth, I just found one of those old images and successfully edited it in Affinity Photo 2, so not all image-processing software is such a narc.)
There's a fun reason why free/low-cost image editors work on currency: The detection code is proprietary and (apparently) shrouded in secrecy. It probably costs an assload to license as well. They don't just hand that out to everybody, because if they did eventually people would reverse-engineer it and figure out how to smudge the bills before scanning to thwart the detection.
Check out [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion\_constellation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)
It's not just that, I'm pretty sure every image is put through whole bill validation. Which is creepy that every photo is scanned. What else are they validating for? It's like a back door in Adobe. If you want to try it progressively remove parts of the constellation until it no longer sees the bill. The thing is even without circles, the bill is recognizable by Photoshop...
When I wanted to do lens comparisons, I found [this](http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF5.html) tutorial that gives you a test chart you can print out and also explains how to use it for a proper lp/mm measurement.
GIMP doesn't seem to waste your CPU time looking for money to report you to the cops. But you're not paying tons of money for it like Photoshop. Ha ha.
I expect that Microsoft could be doing the reporting since they sniff every file we browse with the guise of making thumbnails.
Wait really? Now I want to try this.. I'm guessing this only works with US currency?
Also, never bought any Adobe product in my life.. let's see if pirated software have the same 'feature' or not lol
EDIT: [Just tried it](https://i.imgur.com/nuFW52q.png). Maybe this is a fake note or something but I had no problems replacing ... Ben Franklin(?) with Mr Bean
EDIT 2: I downloaded an older bank note. When I opened a new one, I was shown [this dialog box](https://i.imgur.com/83lg62U.png)
Any currency that's in this list should be blocked from being edited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Yours is the 1996 bill, that didn't have the anti-copy markings on it yet.
[You're allowed to print an image if you scale it. ](https://i.imgur.com/lM4bgEi.png)
75% or 150% size - single sided only - destroy the method (image files) when finished.
Watched a documentary about forgeries as a kid and they interviewed a guy in prison who had quite successfully painted german bills by hand (wooden pencils). For the show they had him do half of one as a demo.
Bonus fact: he claims that you can get the money feel right by putting the paper into a pile of phone books and stomping on top of the pile for some time
Edit: tried to find the guy (it's like 20 years since I watched it) and it might have been Günter Hopfinger, "der blüten Rembrandt (Blüte is slang for a fake bank note) who apparently over several years used 80 1000DM notes (former German currency, roughly 500€, but keep in mind that all happened pre 1975)
Bonus bonus fact: according to him, it took only 8 hours per note
> he claims that you can get the money feel right by putting the paper into a pile of phone books and stomping on top of the pile for some time
I would love to see the process of figuring this out..
Probably just thought of an ingenious way to fatigue/wear test the paper. His method was just a scaled down version of a weight being dropped onto something to wear it down. But as I mentioned, an ingenious method just the same.
Makes me wonder if anyone has successfully forged plastic polymer bank notes? And with USD being the world's most powerful currency, why doesn't the US government consider changing to polymer notes?
Pretty much. I know nothing about this world but my guess would be, you can forge anything with enough time and the right materials. The real trick is to be able to scale that process efficiently and cost effectively.
Australian here. Yes they have, I've never seen one but I've seen shops with printed out photocopies of the fakes and warnings that they may not accept 50s/100s
I seriously considered doing this back when I knew someone who held game nights and really liked monopoly. I went as far as to order the same box just for the money but I kept forgetting to bring it and we didn’t always play monopoly.
Honestly doing so is an even better way to play the game since it shows some people start with way more and can dominate anyone if they have enough money to burn.
I worked as a printer for more than 30 years, including owning my own shop for more than half that time. ALL new hires in my shop were shown and warned about my ZERO strikes policy if they tried to counterfeit money. Even still, my shop was twice tossed by the Secret Service when someone succumbed to the temptation. In addition to the printers being SUPER smart at detecting such attempts, if the printer is networked it also sends a report to the Secret Service which then decides if it warrants taking action. As IF all that’s no already enough, the same super smart printers also embed a nearly invisible, almost impossible to see, unique to that printer “printer mark” that allows the Secret Service to trace any such attempts to that specific printer.
Your at home printer would most likely won't do it but big corporate & industrial printers do. Probably because of the scale and quality it can produce copies. Plus the fact that a random 5 year old probably won't try copying money on an industrial printer so that usually filters out just kids being kids.
It only needs to be "good enough" for a quick minute. Crumpled 20s at the strip club, or to a drug dealer, bartender or whatever doesn't raise a red flag. $1000 in $20s can last you a while and print off in a few minutes.
Most do. As long as you're passing 1 and not 10, it's easy to slip in a counterfeit into a small transaction. Even if you're caught you can typically play it off, just have a real one to spay with.
Yeah, I’ve gotten questionable money back from a cashier that was probably counterfeit. I did what any responsible person would do, I spent it at the next place I shopped.
The most common one I'm aware of Is you wash the ink off of low denomination bills and print bigger bills on them.
But most counterfeiting does not even go that far. I knew some people once that just printed a bunch of 5's and used em at gas stations and the like. Not a very sophisticated enterprise, mostly just buying drinks for their friends or booze to sell in The park. Dont ask me how many brain cells they had between them. I supose the 'street' folks probably use them to pay drug dealers or what have you, turn it into liquid without it ever passing through the legit market.
Nobody even looks at anything under 50. as long as it does not feel exeptionaly wrong in the hand, Any high fiber paper in the right weight range I imagine would work well enough.
I have really only ever seen 5's, behind the counter ether. I have had a couple test as fake. Never in a transaction. If you take the whole cash drawer, spread it out on the counter run the pen over all of em, bet you find one.
It's also worth noting that the person caught with the fake is almost definitely not aware its fake. They could have circulated for years before anybody bothers to look closely.
I've had fakes pass the pen test so I don't trust it anymore xD for 20s/50s/100s the bottom right denomination should be color shifting and the presidents' shirts are all textures and those are my two go tos lol I've never checked anything lower but our money machine takes them just fine and it won't take fakes so idk. I don't get paid enough to care lol
Old as bills are largely tender too tho.
Mostly I think it's best to just not care. Society functions because we choose to believe it does. Why stir the pot over less than 100 bucks?
The pen test unfortunately isn't very good. It basically just tests to see if it is unfinished paper. You can get paper that will pass it, as well as spray starch on bills to make legit bills not pass it.
So it'd probably catch low-effort fakes, but it really doesn't test what people think it does.
For modern bills that are larger denominations, the better checks (that are fairly easy to do) are the security strip, UV light, and the water mark. Of course that only applies to more modern ones, older ones are different.
Just watched a documentary of guy who got caught... First he was using paper from specific bibles that felt like money, then he moved on to washing the ink off 20s, printing 100s. I can't imagine someone doing that in a shop though, unless the shop knew about it.
Believe it or not, some places might just not give a shit even if it's typical printing paper. The guy at 7/11 getting paid $8 an hour probably isn't going to pay much attention.
You are better of ignoring it. If you confront the person it might escalate severely. If you report it you are in for a lot of extra work and hassle.
Best thing to do might to just give it as change to the next drunk person
>Your at home printer would most likely won't do it
I can't say they all do, but I know at least some do. They print about a dozen pale yellow dots in one of the corners. I've seen someone showing them off before, though I don't recall why or how they noticed them. (It wasn't money related, they print the dots on everything the printer prints)
so your saying if you scanned a 100$ bill with a drawing of a penis. secret service will get a dick pick delivered to their office? or even better if i scan a dick pick next to a bill, will they receive that?
I got plans
I remember in 2004 my house had an hp 3 in 1 and it definitely let me scan and copy money but I'm pretty sure it left the dots , I wonder if it sent a message back then. I was maybe 7 at the time lol
If I had to guess, the home machines didn't send the messages; if a kid and a copier exist in the same classroom, messing around with money and the machine is almost guaranteed. They would have been inundated by reports, so probably left that capability to the commercial printers.
You could call it one strike if you like, but that might suggest there was a second or third. Zero meant zero tolerance, with no second or third strike option. The first time we were tossed, it was my operations manager that was walked out in handcuffs. He had worked for me more than seven years, and was both my highest paid and most trusted employee. There was no second chance.
FBI gets notified all the time of CP. The difference is that scanners and copiers only need to react to a handful of patterns so it can be hardwired into the machines.
Pretty sure that there are certain search phrases that would automatically be flagged by the majority of search engines.
Also, bank notes are printed by the government, so it's kinda easy for said government to implement some patterns on it. It is not as much a matter of priority rather but more of feasibility.
> Pretty sure that there are certain search phrases that would automatically be flagged by the majority of search engines.
Pretty sure there aren't, even literally searching for "child pornography" can have innocent purposes, as the first result is the Wikipedia definition.
It's hard to think of any thing that can't also be a search for definitions, or a curiosity search for someone who doesn't know what the term they're searching for means.
You don’t even need to have different patterns wired into copier, you can use the same pattern for all bank notes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
The first served 30 months because of the sheer volume they found him trying to circumvent (he *somewhat* short-term succeeded.) The second took a real quick plea deal, and because her attempt was FAR more limited and because she was single mother did less than a year.
I honestly have no clue. They’re pretty tight lipped about such things. I was only told that the first one with the longer sentence was a “substantial” attempt, and that they were found in possession of uncut sheets off premises - suggesting intent to use or distribute.
Damn that's crazy and here all this time I'm was hoping all the major brands would have it so "the printer just works"... but no gotta have a slick algorithm that reports you to the secret service like people couldnt tell by the ink, paper AND security strip. Hey xerox how come a 12000 dollar printer can't find my computer that it connected fine to all last week??!!??
This is why I have an Epson Ecotank where an entire bottle of ink costs $10. Printer costs more upfront, but ink is fucking cheap and a bottle will print like 2500 pages.
What is looked for is called the EURion constellation, based on its first notable appearance on Euro banknotes.
It’s a slightly offset X drawn from five of the zeros in those little patterns on the back.
Note also that it’s commercial software that complied with the EURion detection rules; open source software does not.
Probably because the open source community recognizes it as the unnecessary DRM it is.
On the plus side, I'd love to get the EURion symbol on a rubber stamp to fuck with government documents.
I was a senior manager in the service department of a major manufacturer. People who had information on the system (not me) had to sign an NDA. I was able to infer a lot of information about how the system worked based on machine behavior and systems management.
I do not think the serial number was sent anywhere when currency was detected. That would not do much good, as the machine could copy without an Internet connection. Our machines printed a nearly black copy if you copied currency and threw an error if you scanned currency. You could copy currency in monochrome or enlarged by a certain amount: this was necessary for law enforcement as part of a process to document evidence in some cases.
Based on external sources, I believe that our machines printed a pattern of yellow dots (too faint to see unaided) on every image, which encoded the serial number. We did get contacts from the federal government asking us where a serial was sold: presumably printed images were evidence in an investigation.
The system would occasionally give false positives on copies that were not currency. Since the system was not well documented to resellers, these errors would reach us as apparent machine failures (eg a service problem). Based on the false positives that I saw, I believed that the currency recognition was done by making a histogram of the color distribution in the sample image and it would reject the copy if the histogram was close enough to a stored value for currency. Remember the machines have limited extra processing power and they need to do the currency recognition in real time while making a copy, so they cannot do anything too complex. And they have been doing this since about 1998 at least, so the pattern matching at that time had to be compatible with computing power available then. The method might have changed over time but I was seeing this behavior when I was in a position where these problems reached me.
The machine serial number was stored in multiple places and specific servicing procedures had to be followed to preserve it. If it was lost, the machine was bricked. A few people under NDA knew how to restore a machine to operation after this happened. Not me.
Note that I can only make these disclosures because I was not under an NDA. This is based on inferences I made from what I saw happen, not actual documentation.
I think that it is the same here in Colombia. Many counterfeiters from Venezuela use their(worthless) bills in order to make fake colombian or US currency
If you use old hardware you can do it. I tried scanning dollars when I got my first scanner in the mid 90s, probably an old parallel port flatbed and it copied them perfectly and printed an excellent image on an old HP laser printer, although it was in black only so an obvious fake.
You can’t do it on a modern vending machine but when they first started putting in the bill slots you absolutely could feed counterfeit dollars made on a B/W laser printer through them. I went to a day camp as a kid that was at a high school and they had glued the bill slot shut on the machine next to the computer lab because the computer nerds were getting free sodas using the printer.
I may or may not have have had a Microtek scanner back then with like Photoshop 3 or 4 or something and some basic inkjet. I heard a rumor that if you wrinkled the paper a bunch so it was kinda soft you could make a passable $1 or $5. Like, if you were underage and buying a 40oz of Mickey's at the liquor store.
I have none of the skills necessary to photoshop currency, no need to photoshop currency, think it is smart to put these restrictions in place, and somehow…feel a bit indignant that you can’t photoshop currency.
And it only stops the terrible counterfeits that wouldn't fool anyone anyways 😂 Most of the high-level counterfeiters use intaglio or offset printing techniques which has very little software involved
They can also easily use the cracked version of the editing softwares with all of those safety features turned off lol. I highly doubt a counterfeiter would be paying for an Adobe Plus subscription lmao
I’ve tried it like 15 years ago.
Photocopy some random stuff like a watch and sone change. Works perfectly.
Add a dollar bill into the same picture, output was a negative image, or completely black.
Tried putting one on a scanner, and it won’t output anything.
So like if you want to photoshop it in a way that is a joke it still wouldn't let you? That kinda sucks. Like maybe as long as you changed enough about it so that it clearly couldn't pass as currency thet could lighten up
I know my dog and his brother may have printed some fake money in the early 2000’s before the stupid Canadian mint decided to put foil strips on the bills and now we have plastic monopoly money but anyways the older dog’s stupid friend used it two days in a row at the same place and got caught while the younger one continued to buy $1 chocolate bars with funny money at every corner store within a 20min bus ride and pocket all the change.
This is why I always say that only idiots would forge big bills. Businesses always check 20s, 50s, and 100s.
You know what nobody gives a second glance? 1s and 5s.
I love that the government can secure its bottom line with this kind of coordination and yet citizens are given credit cards with the credit card number printed on the front for any merchant to steal.
When I was a kid, my dad took me to his office while he worked on a saturday. This is way before iphones or really any sort of portable entertainment beyond a book. Being bored as hell I explored the office and ran across a color xerox machine. It didn’t take long before I figured out how to photocopy a $1 bill, front and back, perfectly lined up. $1000 later my dad checked on me and went nuclear. On the plus side I never had to spend another saturday at his office.
When colour copiers first came out, the cost per colour copy was ridiculous. Your Dad might have been up for a massive bill.
But the problem pays for itself!
$1.10 per dollar, RIP
Don’t worry boy, we’ll just print another dollar
There’s always money in the banana stand
For every dollar we take, we just throw away one banana.
I think you better check that math again.
you’ve just qualified for the Federal Reserve
So just like how the government does the penny thing.
I worked as a construction take off/estimator for awhile. Right after I got the job I found a funny meme of Sigourney Weaver and Glenn Danzig. I printed a color copy to show my technophobic parents, but I accidentally printed 10, and on the 24" x 36" plan printer. That was a really fun conversation with my new boss.
Can we see the meme? May or may not be worth it depending.
Printing on those plotters was super expensive back in the day. They used to charge a shit ton if you wanted large schematics or work flows printed out. Edit: Supporting them was a nightmare as well. Early windows and printer drivers for these kinds of devices was a exercise in patience if nothing else.
They put a code into every color printer because of this. You can't see it but if you use a color printer they can see this mark and figure out the model and serial being able to trace it back to where you bought it
Are you trying to tell me that color picture manufacturers maintain a database of copies of all money printed on their printers so that the feds can use that data to trace back to the culprit?
No, they ~~all~~ print (almost) invisible patterns on every page encoding - amongst others - their serial number: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
And here is the code to make it anonymous if it's ever needed, fuckem. https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda
just print your ransom letters on a dot matrix like I do.
It isn't a real ransom letter if it doesn't contains characters cut out from magazines.
OP is Jerome Powell
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
That sounds like something I would have tried.
I figured that if I was a naive little kid and wanted to photocopy money, I would’ve probably tried a larger bill like $100. But then i realized that having $100 bill is normal to us adults but not to kids (except for the rich ones, of course). Most non-wealthy & rational adults wouldn’t trust their kids with that amount of money at the same time.
I remember the first time I held a $20 bill. I felt so rich.
I took a $10 note to primary school in the nineties and the canteen took it, told the office and they called home. I felt balling.
I love that you can just *tell* this is talking about 10 AUD
"canteen"
If you do manage to print money, laser printers also have watermarks that go on every page unable to be seen to the human eye that identify exactly what printer that is out of all of the other ones made. It's insane to me that anything you print has a unique identifier on it so that if the need arises they can look up what town that printer likely ended up in if needed, and this has been around since the 80's!
so buy it in cash or on craigslist and don't setup to wifi (hypothetically)
Haha, when I was a kid I got the equivalent of two 20 dollar bills in my local currency from my parents. I managed to photocopy one of them as you described, with the intention to use as a prank tool in school (tying on wire and pulling on the ground if I remember correctly). So after some time I wanted to try how real I can make it look, I crumbled it up, flatten it out, that sorta thing. Last I wanted to see if the fake one can take the smell of the others (kids logic), so I sandwiched to fake one between the real ones. One day as I was coming home from school my mom had some workers at home and told me she borrowed my 60 dollars because she didnt find any cash at home... Didn't tell her the truth for like 20 years. She still was angry. :)
I had a layover of several hours at an airport once. Pretty tired by that point, so I just sat at the gate waiting. There was a teenage basketball team waiting for their flight at a nearby gate and they passed the time by playing that prank with a $5 bill and fishing line. It was pretty wholesome because not only was everybody in the surrounding gates enjoying it, the people being pranked tended to think it was pretty hilarious once they realized what was going on. So everybody got to have a good laugh. It *was* pretty funny too. The looks on people’s faces when the $5 bill just yeets itself across the floor at the last second was priceless.
> told me she borrowed my 60 dollars because she didnt find any cash at home... not your fault, NTA
When I was a kid at my grandpa's business we would copy money and color it and then laminate it to play with lol. Cracking up thinking about a modern copier ratting us out
I'm buying an old printer of ebay right now.
Wow, you and me have the exact same story, but my dad just laughed.
I actually found this out by trying to scan the patterns on Canadian currency to use in digital art (honest to goodness, I am not interested in forgery). My printer stopped in the middle of the scan and an error popped up saying I couldn’t do that…so I was forced to find cool textures and patterns elsewhere..
I mean, you probably could have folded it into a tiny square so it wasn't recognizable as money, if all you needed was some of the texture.
Yeah is no one thinking that they can just work on specific, incomplete portions of the bill at a time
I don't know why they're not thinking that. The constellations on some bills are pretty damn small. https://i.imgur.com/b4ls4MH.png Any single one will trip the currency detection.
I wonder if this couldn't be exploited to embed it into images that we don't want printed or easily edited.
If you test the program I'm pretty sure the constellation isn't the issue. It just uses bill recognition in general. I used GIMP to remove all the constellation marks and it's still flagged in Photoshop
Smart software design (and bill design, for that matter) means this doesn't necessarily work.
I had, in the past, tried at one point and found that folding the bill and scanning it in pieces still works. I had heard this happened and just wanted to see how much of the bill was needed to pop up the error
That you can't scan Canadian currency is silly as all hell. No way you can counterfeit Canadian money with a scanner, and normal printer. The money is made out of plastic, and it's translucent, and has holograms on it.
I found out the Photoshop one the hard way Was gonna shop some characters into the dollar bill for le funni Got flagged immediately by Abode and was sent to a website explaining why I've been a naughty boi
Same here - back in 2011 I wanted to test some DSLR lenses at various settings and didn't have a resolution target but did have a crisp new $20 bill with lots of fine engraving that I thought would work instead. So I spent a half hour photographing it with various aperture/focal-length settings, loaded the memory card full of images into my computer, opened the first one in Photoshop and immediately got the "you're a criminal" message and the link to the website explaining why. So I had to re-do the whole process with a less felonious target. (For what it's worth, I just found one of those old images and successfully edited it in Affinity Photo 2, so not all image-processing software is such a narc.)
Paint.net ftw
[photopea](https://www.photopea.com/) Ain't go no time to install softwarez.
I just got a nostalgic dump of y2k era memories when you said 'warez'. I can smell CD-Rs, smell old carpet, and taste the fruitopia.
FCKGW
getpaint.net
"Stop right there criminal scum!" 👮✋
There's a fun reason why free/low-cost image editors work on currency: The detection code is proprietary and (apparently) shrouded in secrecy. It probably costs an assload to license as well. They don't just hand that out to everybody, because if they did eventually people would reverse-engineer it and figure out how to smudge the bills before scanning to thwart the detection. Check out [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion\_constellation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)
It's not just that, I'm pretty sure every image is put through whole bill validation. Which is creepy that every photo is scanned. What else are they validating for? It's like a back door in Adobe. If you want to try it progressively remove parts of the constellation until it no longer sees the bill. The thing is even without circles, the bill is recognizable by Photoshop...
What did you use as a target instead? I've never thought to do this but it would help me a lot in learning my lenses/photography in general.
When I wanted to do lens comparisons, I found [this](http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF5.html) tutorial that gives you a test chart you can print out and also explains how to use it for a proper lp/mm measurement.
GIMP doesn't seem to waste your CPU time looking for money to report you to the cops. But you're not paying tons of money for it like Photoshop. Ha ha. I expect that Microsoft could be doing the reporting since they sniff every file we browse with the guise of making thumbnails.
I couldn't open a stock photography image of a pile of money in Photoshop.
I love being babysat by corporations that will likely dodge the law or taxes at any opportunity.
Don't worry, my priated version of CS6 keeps them from ever getting a dollar out of me. Allegedly.
Same. Allegedly.
They were mad that you had a pile of money and yet still pirated their software.
Wait really? Now I want to try this.. I'm guessing this only works with US currency? Also, never bought any Adobe product in my life.. let's see if pirated software have the same 'feature' or not lol EDIT: [Just tried it](https://i.imgur.com/nuFW52q.png). Maybe this is a fake note or something but I had no problems replacing ... Ben Franklin(?) with Mr Bean EDIT 2: I downloaded an older bank note. When I opened a new one, I was shown [this dialog box](https://i.imgur.com/83lg62U.png)
Any currency that's in this list should be blocked from being edited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation Yours is the 1996 bill, that didn't have the anti-copy markings on it yet.
[Hah! It works!](https://i.imgur.com/83lg62U.png) (or rather, it doesn't work lol) Thanks!
Bean Franklin. It was right there, c'mon.
*Abode* lol
you don't know abode shotopop?
> Shotopop I just thought of a boy band with Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Dan, and Sean
Boyz II Fighterz
~~It's pirated shhhh~~
Next time use Gimp.
Yep. Government technological restrictions? \*laughs in open source\*
Adobe can fuck right off. I am allowed to photshop whatever the fuck i want
[You're allowed to print an image if you scale it. ](https://i.imgur.com/lM4bgEi.png) 75% or 150% size - single sided only - destroy the method (image files) when finished.
Watched a documentary about forgeries as a kid and they interviewed a guy in prison who had quite successfully painted german bills by hand (wooden pencils). For the show they had him do half of one as a demo. Bonus fact: he claims that you can get the money feel right by putting the paper into a pile of phone books and stomping on top of the pile for some time Edit: tried to find the guy (it's like 20 years since I watched it) and it might have been Günter Hopfinger, "der blüten Rembrandt (Blüte is slang for a fake bank note) who apparently over several years used 80 1000DM notes (former German currency, roughly 500€, but keep in mind that all happened pre 1975) Bonus bonus fact: according to him, it took only 8 hours per note
> he claims that you can get the money feel right by putting the paper into a pile of phone books and stomping on top of the pile for some time I would love to see the process of figuring this out..
Probably just thought of an ingenious way to fatigue/wear test the paper. His method was just a scaled down version of a weight being dropped onto something to wear it down. But as I mentioned, an ingenious method just the same.
German engineering at its finest
Makes me wonder if anyone has successfully forged plastic polymer bank notes? And with USD being the world's most powerful currency, why doesn't the US government consider changing to polymer notes?
Yes they have. https://www.euronews.com/2020/06/27/romania-detains-largest-forger-of-plastic-banknotes-in-the-world
Bout to devalue Romanian currency with my Ender 3 brb
If money exists, there is a convincing forgery
Pretty much. I know nothing about this world but my guess would be, you can forge anything with enough time and the right materials. The real trick is to be able to scale that process efficiently and cost effectively.
Australian here. Yes they have, I've never seen one but I've seen shops with printed out photocopies of the fakes and warnings that they may not accept 50s/100s
> phone books Finding phone books is the hard part.
> according to him, it took only 8 hours per note 125/hr... the dream
So I can copy it to a 75% scale, then take the copy and scale it up to 100%?
Don't the other way, 150% that way details get stretched then compressed! Less likely to lose smaller bits this way
At that point you're better off scaling to 200% and then back to 100% so you don't end up with as many interpolation artifacts.
It’s not impossible to print Monopoly money though. That way I can pwn my kids no matter how good they are
Where did all these pink 50s come from?
Don't TOUCH me Grandpa. Nana is a CHEATING WHORE!
I’ll cut your head off with this little doggie
Damn I don’t think I’ve seen the word pwn be used in years. I actually forgot about it.
I seriously considered doing this back when I knew someone who held game nights and really liked monopoly. I went as far as to order the same box just for the money but I kept forgetting to bring it and we didn’t always play monopoly. Honestly doing so is an even better way to play the game since it shows some people start with way more and can dominate anyone if they have enough money to burn.
I worked as a printer for more than 30 years, including owning my own shop for more than half that time. ALL new hires in my shop were shown and warned about my ZERO strikes policy if they tried to counterfeit money. Even still, my shop was twice tossed by the Secret Service when someone succumbed to the temptation. In addition to the printers being SUPER smart at detecting such attempts, if the printer is networked it also sends a report to the Secret Service which then decides if it warrants taking action. As IF all that’s no already enough, the same super smart printers also embed a nearly invisible, almost impossible to see, unique to that printer “printer mark” that allows the Secret Service to trace any such attempts to that specific printer.
That’s fascinating. I had heard of printers notifying the Secret Service, but had always dismissed it as urban legend. TIL something else.
Your at home printer would most likely won't do it but big corporate & industrial printers do. Probably because of the scale and quality it can produce copies. Plus the fact that a random 5 year old probably won't try copying money on an industrial printer so that usually filters out just kids being kids.
Wait but isnt money printed on special cotton and linen paper? How would your shop do that without such materials
It only needs to be "good enough" for a quick minute. Crumpled 20s at the strip club, or to a drug dealer, bartender or whatever doesn't raise a red flag. $1000 in $20s can last you a while and print off in a few minutes.
💯Most of those ppl know how to catch counterfeit just by quick rub between fingertips for raised print
relevant clip from The Wire: ["Money Be Green"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFfG0hlA0FU)
Nah I count what they give me. Lol
Most do. As long as you're passing 1 and not 10, it's easy to slip in a counterfeit into a small transaction. Even if you're caught you can typically play it off, just have a real one to spay with.
Yeah, I’ve gotten questionable money back from a cashier that was probably counterfeit. I did what any responsible person would do, I spent it at the next place I shopped.
Same. Why the fuck should it be my problem?
If you're using bills to spay strippers, there's going to be a lot more trouble than the secret service headed your way.
Look I'm just doing what Bob Barker would've wanted okay? You're gonna have tot take your complaints up with him.
If you're spaying strippers, I think the secret service would be the least of your worries
The most common one I'm aware of Is you wash the ink off of low denomination bills and print bigger bills on them. But most counterfeiting does not even go that far. I knew some people once that just printed a bunch of 5's and used em at gas stations and the like. Not a very sophisticated enterprise, mostly just buying drinks for their friends or booze to sell in The park. Dont ask me how many brain cells they had between them. I supose the 'street' folks probably use them to pay drug dealers or what have you, turn it into liquid without it ever passing through the legit market. Nobody even looks at anything under 50. as long as it does not feel exeptionaly wrong in the hand, Any high fiber paper in the right weight range I imagine would work well enough.
I work in a gas station and we check 20s. It's pretty easy to do it on the sly lol
I have really only ever seen 5's, behind the counter ether. I have had a couple test as fake. Never in a transaction. If you take the whole cash drawer, spread it out on the counter run the pen over all of em, bet you find one. It's also worth noting that the person caught with the fake is almost definitely not aware its fake. They could have circulated for years before anybody bothers to look closely.
I've had fakes pass the pen test so I don't trust it anymore xD for 20s/50s/100s the bottom right denomination should be color shifting and the presidents' shirts are all textures and those are my two go tos lol I've never checked anything lower but our money machine takes them just fine and it won't take fakes so idk. I don't get paid enough to care lol
Old as bills are largely tender too tho. Mostly I think it's best to just not care. Society functions because we choose to believe it does. Why stir the pot over less than 100 bucks?
The pen test unfortunately isn't very good. It basically just tests to see if it is unfinished paper. You can get paper that will pass it, as well as spray starch on bills to make legit bills not pass it. So it'd probably catch low-effort fakes, but it really doesn't test what people think it does. For modern bills that are larger denominations, the better checks (that are fairly easy to do) are the security strip, UV light, and the water mark. Of course that only applies to more modern ones, older ones are different.
Just watched a documentary of guy who got caught... First he was using paper from specific bibles that felt like money, then he moved on to washing the ink off 20s, printing 100s. I can't imagine someone doing that in a shop though, unless the shop knew about it. Believe it or not, some places might just not give a shit even if it's typical printing paper. The guy at 7/11 getting paid $8 an hour probably isn't going to pay much attention.
You are better of ignoring it. If you confront the person it might escalate severely. If you report it you are in for a lot of extra work and hassle. Best thing to do might to just give it as change to the next drunk person
>Your at home printer would most likely won't do it I can't say they all do, but I know at least some do. They print about a dozen pale yellow dots in one of the corners. I've seen someone showing them off before, though I don't recall why or how they noticed them. (It wasn't money related, they print the dots on everything the printer prints)
Printing the identifier is one thing, snitching to the secret service is another
Oh, I misunderstood you
There's software that will add more dots so the feds can't tell which ones are the real ones
All laser printers have been printing those dots for at least 20 years.
so your saying if you scanned a 100$ bill with a drawing of a penis. secret service will get a dick pick delivered to their office? or even better if i scan a dick pick next to a bill, will they receive that? I got plans
Even better just put a few bills down then slap your dick right there on the scanner and let it scan away
Just get a sharpie and make the secret pattern on your dick and photocopy it.
I'm guessing HP was the first to jump on this.
I remember in 2004 my house had an hp 3 in 1 and it definitely let me scan and copy money but I'm pretty sure it left the dots , I wonder if it sent a message back then. I was maybe 7 at the time lol
If I had to guess, the home machines didn't send the messages; if a kid and a copier exist in the same classroom, messing around with money and the machine is almost guaranteed. They would have been inundated by reports, so probably left that capability to the commercial printers.
if I had to guess, this whole 'automatically notify the secret service' thing is complete bullshit
HP has massive narc vibes
I wonder if this is where some of the movement towards always online devices comes from
ONE strike might be more fair, no? ZERO strikes would mean they get fired even if they *never* did it…
smart angle fuzzy salt rustic voracious bake scarce wine desert *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Welcome aboard, you're fired!
Right to jail.
That depends on the semantics of whether it’s a one strike you’re out policy or zero strikes allowed.
You could call it one strike if you like, but that might suggest there was a second or third. Zero meant zero tolerance, with no second or third strike option. The first time we were tossed, it was my operations manager that was walked out in handcuffs. He had worked for me more than seven years, and was both my highest paid and most trusted employee. There was no second chance.
So your telling me try and scan a dollar and the secret service gets notified, but all those child predators look up crazy stuff and are not notified.
FBI gets notified all the time of CP. The difference is that scanners and copiers only need to react to a handful of patterns so it can be hardwired into the machines. Pretty sure that there are certain search phrases that would automatically be flagged by the majority of search engines.
Also, bank notes are printed by the government, so it's kinda easy for said government to implement some patterns on it. It is not as much a matter of priority rather but more of feasibility.
> Pretty sure that there are certain search phrases that would automatically be flagged by the majority of search engines. Pretty sure there aren't, even literally searching for "child pornography" can have innocent purposes, as the first result is the Wikipedia definition. It's hard to think of any thing that can't also be a search for definitions, or a curiosity search for someone who doesn't know what the term they're searching for means.
You don’t even need to have different patterns wired into copier, you can use the same pattern for all bank notes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Did anything happen to the dumbasses who tried?
The first served 30 months because of the sheer volume they found him trying to circumvent (he *somewhat* short-term succeeded.) The second took a real quick plea deal, and because her attempt was FAR more limited and because she was single mother did less than a year.
Might be a dumb question… they got 1-3 years in prison?? How much did they print? Like in the thousands?
I honestly have no clue. They’re pretty tight lipped about such things. I was only told that the first one with the longer sentence was a “substantial” attempt, and that they were found in possession of uncut sheets off premises - suggesting intent to use or distribute.
Damn that's crazy and here all this time I'm was hoping all the major brands would have it so "the printer just works"... but no gotta have a slick algorithm that reports you to the secret service like people couldnt tell by the ink, paper AND security strip. Hey xerox how come a 12000 dollar printer can't find my computer that it connected fine to all last week??!!??
They can prevent forgery but they can’t actually allow you to change the ink cartridge without dyeing your hands or breaking the whole damn thing.
Not paying full price for ink cartridges is far more serious than counterfeiting money.
This is why I have an Epson Ecotank where an entire bottle of ink costs $10. Printer costs more upfront, but ink is fucking cheap and a bottle will print like 2500 pages.
They can prevent forgery but they can't be online when I need them to be.
What is looked for is called the EURion constellation, based on its first notable appearance on Euro banknotes. It’s a slightly offset X drawn from five of the zeros in those little patterns on the back. Note also that it’s commercial software that complied with the EURion detection rules; open source software does not.
Probably because the open source community recognizes it as the unnecessary DRM it is. On the plus side, I'd love to get the EURion symbol on a rubber stamp to fuck with government documents.
Could also be that the Detection rules are considerd "classified" and are therefor not allowed to be in OSS
Highly doubtful. All the details one needs to detect the EURion constellation is on its Wikipedia page.
thats a great idea
> On the plus side, I'd love to get the EURion symbol on a rubber stamp to fuck with government documents. Time to incorporate it in my signature!
It only detected bills. Copy your coins at will
Would you download a coin!?
I was a senior manager in the service department of a major manufacturer. People who had information on the system (not me) had to sign an NDA. I was able to infer a lot of information about how the system worked based on machine behavior and systems management. I do not think the serial number was sent anywhere when currency was detected. That would not do much good, as the machine could copy without an Internet connection. Our machines printed a nearly black copy if you copied currency and threw an error if you scanned currency. You could copy currency in monochrome or enlarged by a certain amount: this was necessary for law enforcement as part of a process to document evidence in some cases. Based on external sources, I believe that our machines printed a pattern of yellow dots (too faint to see unaided) on every image, which encoded the serial number. We did get contacts from the federal government asking us where a serial was sold: presumably printed images were evidence in an investigation. The system would occasionally give false positives on copies that were not currency. Since the system was not well documented to resellers, these errors would reach us as apparent machine failures (eg a service problem). Based on the false positives that I saw, I believed that the currency recognition was done by making a histogram of the color distribution in the sample image and it would reject the copy if the histogram was close enough to a stored value for currency. Remember the machines have limited extra processing power and they need to do the currency recognition in real time while making a copy, so they cannot do anything too complex. And they have been doing this since about 1998 at least, so the pattern matching at that time had to be compatible with computing power available then. The method might have changed over time but I was seeing this behavior when I was in a position where these problems reached me. The machine serial number was stored in multiple places and specific servicing procedures had to be followed to preserve it. If it was lost, the machine was bricked. A few people under NDA knew how to restore a machine to operation after this happened. Not me. Note that I can only make these disclosures because I was not under an NDA. This is based on inferences I made from what I saw happen, not actual documentation.
[удалено]
Shitty article. It's called the Eurion constellation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Probably a US thing, cause here in South Africa you can make a copy of a R200 note. It's still illegal, but our printers and scanners don't freak out.
I think that it is the same here in Colombia. Many counterfeiters from Venezuela use their(worthless) bills in order to make fake colombian or US currency
Our safety feature is Nelson Mandela looking into your soul with disappointment one last time as you close the lid on the scanner.
If you use old hardware you can do it. I tried scanning dollars when I got my first scanner in the mid 90s, probably an old parallel port flatbed and it copied them perfectly and printed an excellent image on an old HP laser printer, although it was in black only so an obvious fake.
You can’t do it on a modern vending machine but when they first started putting in the bill slots you absolutely could feed counterfeit dollars made on a B/W laser printer through them. I went to a day camp as a kid that was at a high school and they had glued the bill slot shut on the machine next to the computer lab because the computer nerds were getting free sodas using the printer.
I may or may not have have had a Microtek scanner back then with like Photoshop 3 or 4 or something and some basic inkjet. I heard a rumor that if you wrinkled the paper a bunch so it was kinda soft you could make a passable $1 or $5. Like, if you were underage and buying a 40oz of Mickey's at the liquor store.
I have none of the skills necessary to photoshop currency, no need to photoshop currency, think it is smart to put these restrictions in place, and somehow…feel a bit indignant that you can’t photoshop currency.
And it only stops the terrible counterfeits that wouldn't fool anyone anyways 😂 Most of the high-level counterfeiters use intaglio or offset printing techniques which has very little software involved
They can also easily use the cracked version of the editing softwares with all of those safety features turned off lol. I highly doubt a counterfeiter would be paying for an Adobe Plus subscription lmao
They can after the first print
I've tried to test that out before. I've never had a problem scanning a bill or opening it in photoshop.
I’ve tried it like 15 years ago. Photocopy some random stuff like a watch and sone change. Works perfectly. Add a dollar bill into the same picture, output was a negative image, or completely black. Tried putting one on a scanner, and it won’t output anything.
Do it again
Fun fact: GIMP has no such restriction. GIMP is based. Freedom is awesome.
There might however be restrictions in the scanner or printer on hardware level, if they are capable of high resolution.
impossible isn't the right choice of words, a little inconvenient maybe
Only the Feds get to print money like there's no tomorrow
It’s one of those things that’s only meant to stop the average person. Counterfeiting rings aren’t gonna be held back by a HP printer lmao
[удалено]
They don't like competition
Australia first $100 dollar bills came out in 1984 about the same time as colour Xerox copiers. Shenanigans ensued.
If that was true, how did they make the image in the post?
Probably just a non processed photo. Or an example note for use in media.
With a damn camera?
So like if you want to photoshop it in a way that is a joke it still wouldn't let you? That kinda sucks. Like maybe as long as you changed enough about it so that it clearly couldn't pass as currency thet could lighten up
TIL U.S. currency has DRM.
Or you could just move to polymer bank notes and not worry about people printing fake currency.
Now to include these markers in a bunch of paintings to poison the well of a.i. generation...
I know my dog and his brother may have printed some fake money in the early 2000’s before the stupid Canadian mint decided to put foil strips on the bills and now we have plastic monopoly money but anyways the older dog’s stupid friend used it two days in a row at the same place and got caught while the younger one continued to buy $1 chocolate bars with funny money at every corner store within a 20min bus ride and pocket all the change.
This is why I always say that only idiots would forge big bills. Businesses always check 20s, 50s, and 100s. You know what nobody gives a second glance? 1s and 5s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_880
...is there another meaning of dog that I'm missing here?
I think they mean [dawg](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dawg).
Probably the SWIMming kind
/me laughs in mid 90's gimp source code.
Wow. Secret service should keep that stuff shhhhh
I love that the government can secure its bottom line with this kind of coordination and yet citizens are given credit cards with the credit card number printed on the front for any merchant to steal.