If someone asked you to accept a U.S $1 million dollar bill you`d no doubt realize the bill has to be a fake, since such large-denomination currency doesn't exist in the US. Yet, surprisingly, there has been instances of people actually trying to use these bills when making purchases. One example is of a man who, one Saturday in 2006, tried passing the bill at a grocery store in Pittsburgh. Another case is where a woman in Georgia tried to buy more than $1,500 worth of merchandise at Wal-Mart. Needless to say the police were called and in both cases the people were arrested. Most times, though, forgeries, or fakes, aren't so obvious.
Take the example in the UK with their 1 coins. Up until a year or so ago it was thought by the Royal Mint that something like one in forty 1 coins were fake. That figure has now been revised to one in twenty. In the year 2007, the Royal mint removed 97,000 fake pound coins from circulation. In the last quarter of 2008 alone that figure had increased to 270,000. And now checking coins for whether they are fake or genuine is big business in itself. One company which manufactures machines to check coins claims that 5% of coins tested are fakes. Anyone who accepts coins on a large scale, like car parking companies, vending machine operators, even banks, are getting very concerned over the amount of forgeries in existence.
Fake money has been going almost as long as the real article. It`s seen as easy money, and almost anyone with a computer and printer can produce fake notes. The quality is low of course, but chances are some will be in circulation at any given time, if only for a brief period. Professional gangs take much more care on getting the quality up to a high standard and they flood the market with the forgeries. During the second world war, the Nazis attempted to forge US Dollars and British Pound notes, and managed to produce huge amounts of them. Since the creation of Euro currency in 2002 the forgers have been hard at work copying it. It`s even reckoned that North Korea produce US dollars, though some feel such high quality notes are more likely to be produced elsewhere. The battle against fake money is ongoing, and although governments come up with more sophisticated ways to make their money harder to copy, someone will always come along with equally sophisticated methods to cancel the changes out. Remember that legally, if you spot a fake note or coin, you shouldn't pass it on, but hand it in to the authorities. That makes that particular money worthless as far as you are concerned. Most of us therefore just tend to accept that the money we have in our pocket is okay on the basis that what we don`t know (or look too closely at), can`t hurt us.
Take the example in the UK with their 1 coins. Up until a year or so ago it was thought by the Royal Mint that something like one in forty 1 coins were fake. That figure has now been revised to one in twenty. In the year 2007, the Royal mint removed 97,000 fake pound coins from circulation. In the last quarter of 2008 alone that figure had increased to 270,000. And now checking coins for whether they are fake or genuine is big business in itself. One company which manufactures machines to check coins claims that 5% of coins tested are fakes. Anyone who accepts coins on a large scale, like car parking companies, vending machine operators, even banks, are getting very concerned over the amount of forgeries in existence.
Fake money has been going almost as long as the real article. It`s seen as easy money, and almost anyone with a computer and printer can produce fake notes. The quality is low of course, but chances are some will be in circulation at any given time, if only for a brief period. Professional gangs take much more care on getting the quality up to a high standard and they flood the market with the forgeries. During the second world war, the Nazis attempted to forge US Dollars and British Pound notes, and managed to produce huge amounts of them. Since the creation of Euro currency in 2002 the forgers have been hard at work copying it. It`s even reckoned that North Korea produce US dollars, though some feel such high quality notes are more likely to be produced elsewhere. The battle against fake money is ongoing, and although governments come up with more sophisticated ways to make their money harder to copy, someone will always come along with equally sophisticated methods to cancel the changes out. Remember that legally, if you spot a fake note or coin, you shouldn't pass it on, but hand it in to the authorities. That makes that particular money worthless as far as you are concerned. Most of us therefore just tend to accept that the money we have in our pocket is okay on the basis that what we don`t know (or look too closely at), can`t hurt us.
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