SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Rhonda Schwartz reports that master counterfeiter Frank Bourassa has been allowed to walk free after turning over a huge quantity of fake US $20 bills that authorities say are "not detectable by the naked eye." "I'm safe, absolutely," says Bourassa after paying a $1,500 fine in Montreal, Canada, and spending only a month and a half in jail after Canadian authorities agreed that they would not extradite him to the United States for prosecution. "They can't do nothing about that." Bourassa's fake $20 first showed up in Troy, Michigan in 2010 and US and Canadian authorities spent almost four years tracking the source to Bourassa. "To detect the counterfeit on this one is very difficult," says RCMP investigator Dan Michaud. Bourassa says he spent two years studying the details about currency security on the website of the US Secret Service to learn how to produce his fake money. Although special security features were added to US $100 bills in 2010, security features added to the $20 in 2003 have not been updated since then. US bills are "the easiest of them all" to counterfeit says Bourassa, because they are not printed on polymer. "Even third world countries in Africa have polymer bills already."
The RCMP and the US Secret Service raided Bourassa's home, but he still had a card to play because authorities did not know where the remainder of his special paper and fake twenties was hidden. In the end, Bourassa agreed to turn over the remaining fakes and paper in return for a deal his lawyer worked out with Canadian prosecutors that let him walk free. Bourassa regards his accomplishment as a complete victory over the United States government. "It was, like, screw you."
(Score: 2) by mendax on Monday May 12 2014, @10:43PM
You are partially right about that. I suspect that the Mexican government moved to polymer pesos is because the lower denominations won't wear out too fast. I've got some low-denomination peso notes in my collection that are almost rags. American paper money gets withdrawn from circulation before it gets that bad.
But don't knock the Mexican peso. It's not considered a world reserve currency, one that central banks around the world tend to hold, but it's fully convertible and its recent history demonstrates that can hold its value well against the US dollar and other hard currencies.
Cost effective???? Aussie and Canadian polymer notes cost less to make than their face value. So long as the face value covers the cost of the note's manufacture it should not matter much. Perhaps you are referring to the addiction that some governments have with seigniorage [wikipedia.org].
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Monday May 12 2014, @11:27PM
Well it does matter, and quite a bit. Its easy for the production cost of any money to exceed the face value of small denominations. But that is hardly the test that matters.
What does matter is what you alluded to previously, the problem of money wearing out. Not all polymer money has been as durable as the proponents have alleged. On some early trials the ink ran badly in warm climates, and bills would also cross-print each other in a wallet.
Also, very few of these countries can afford to print their own money. Australia prints polymer money for many different countries. (Bangladesh, Brunei, Chile, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Romania, Western Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.) That's part of how they made it cost effective.
There is also the problem of replacing every vending machine in a country each time a change is introduced to the folding currency. The poorer the country the harder that is to justify. So they choose to suffer the counterfeit losses rather than force a mass change on the vending and counting industry.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.