How a $3.85 latte paid for with a fake $100 bill led to counterfeiter's downfall | Hacker News Reader

How a $3.85 latte paid for with a fake $100 bill led to counterfeiter's downfall

arstechnica.com

119 pointsrockdiesel55 comments

Spending my formative years in Las Vegas as a youth I was really impressed how good the dealers were at catching fake bills. Lots of people seemed to assume that because of the rapid pace of the gambling such things would get missed. I was playing poker at Circus Circus and one of the players put down a $100 bill and said, "chips please" and the dealer looked up and said "Well once we get a real $100 I'd be happy to." The argument was short, the player looked affronted and the dealer said simply, "You can insist and we'll detain you for the police, or you can take your fake money elsewhere." Very surreal. It is entirely possible the person was a "known" bad bill passer or something but it really impressed me.

Of course Steve Wozniak having $2 bills made into pads so that he could peel them off the pad and pay with them always cracked me up. That was the case where the cashiers always assumed they were fake, but in fact they were legal bills. Very hilarious.

That's the first I've heard about the $2 bills, and his appearance on hackaday about it is a wonderful example of social engineering.

I was a bank teller in college and I'd probably see a fake $100 or $20 at least once a week. It got really, really easy to tell after about 3-4 months of handling tens of thousands of dollars a day (I deleted it long ago, but I at one point had a photo of me juggling three $100,000 bricks of $100 dollar bills, incredibly stupid thing to take a picture of while at work in the vault, but I was 19 and didn't know any better).

9/10 times the counterfeit bill owner had no idea as they were mostly in cash deposits from local restaurants and whatnot. But 1/10 you could tell the person was trying to pull a fast one. I never made a big deal out of it, just let the customer know it was policy to confiscate, I'd file a report and give them a receipt letting them know I was sending it to the authorities. They could take it up with them at that point.

It seems way more stupid to admit to abetting counterfeiters by not "mak[ing] a big deal out of it" than taking a harmless photo in the vault.

As a bank teller, you're in no place to make that judgement of intent. You simply confiscate and move on.

Working in the favour of Vegas dealers is that they see so many $100 bills come across the table, they probably get a 6th sense that one isn't real.

If you only see $100s once in a while, you probably couldn't tell the difference, but when you see them 100s of times a day, you likely start to notice when one differs from the others, even if you can't point immediately at what that difference might be.

In a similar vein: my hobby is that I'm a Magic: the Gathering tournament judge. I also play and have a decent-sized collection, and courtesy of working at large tournaments I get to know a lot of the big vendors.

For the last year or two there have been waves of concern in the broader community about runs of counterfeit cards allegedly being printed in China; some of the cards they target are old and rare and quite valuable (up to hundreds of dollars per card for the genuine article), while others are just more recent tournament-staple cards.

I've encountered a few people in tournaments with counterfeit cards who had no idea until confronted about it. But to me, they stick out pretty obviously, and to the vendors -- who handle thousands of cards each day -- they're instantly recognizable. And that's taking into account the fact that there have historically been pretty wide variations in the quality of the genuine print runs.

Short of "handle a lot of cards to get a feel for how they should be", though, I don't know what to tell people who come to me worried about accidentally buying counterfeits.

Perhaps it's common knowledge, but it may be worth noting that (at least in the US) a merchant who accepts a counterfeit $100 bill, later notices that it is counterfeit, and does the "right thing" by reporting it simply eats the loss. The Secret Service thanks you, confiscates the bill, and leaves a receipt, but you lose the item you sold and the change you gave.

By contrast, a merchant who accepts a $100 counterfeit bill, does not notice it is counterfeit, and uses it to purchase something else keeps the profit and loses nothing. As a result, it is not in the self-interest of the merchant to look closely at any bills that have already been accepted.

If the goal is to catch counterfeiters, it would seem like there would be a better way to align the self-interest of the person who innocently accepts the counterfeit bill and the goals of the law enforcement agency.

Years ago a friend got a fake $20 from an ATM and reported it to the Secret Service. I don't remember the details, but he told me the Secret Service really hassled him for a while. So it's probably best just to throw the fake bill in the garbage (or burn it to be sure).

or just forget about it being fake, and use it like normal. It's a drop in the ocean, and eating the loss doesn't do you any good, reporting it doesn't do you any good. I know that's selfish, but the way the system has been setup means this is the best thing to do.

True, if you can get away with it, then do that I guess. But there is some risk in passing a fake bill even if you didn't counterfeit it and even if it's not your fault that you came into its possession.

I think the real challenge here is to avoid the Cobra effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

It always amazes me that counterfeiters still target $100 bills. While that might be more efficient, it's a lot riskier. $50s and $100s are quite rare compared to the ubiquitous $20 (thanks to ATMs). Most places of business will look oddly at anyone paying with a $100, especially for something as small as a latte; a $20 would rarely get a second glance.

I may be remembering this wrong, but I believe there is a prolific counterfeiter of $5 bills that's remained at large for quite some time.

I remember a story (someone told me it was in Mexico), very similar.

A guy was printing $20 pesos bills but only when he needed some extra money. He had, IIRC a print shop, and since he was humble enough, he never raised suspicion.

So I guess the key to profit from counterfeit money is to just print a small amount here and there.

Hmm...I would assume the key to any criminal activity is making it economically unfeasible for the authorities to go after you.

It's incredible to me that as of the previous version of the $100 bill, that anyone would take the fake bills.

I worked at a bank for about 2 years and the quality of fake $100's I came across was NEVER any good to fool the bank, however, local businesses did not scrutinize it beyond the counterfeit marker (which is rarely indicative of the legitimacy of a bill).

Edit: I should note that every single fake, or suspected fake, would be sent out to the secret service. In the case where several bills would show up in a short period from local businesses, local police would be contacted as well (and of course demand to see the bills, which they never did).

> the quality of fake $100's I came across was NEVER any good

seems like a tautology! I'm surprised it's not required for people to forward to the Secret Service so they can be aware of the trends in forgery.

Respectfully, it's no surprise that all the fake bills you saw looked fake to you.

This is similar to the attitude I frequently see from law enforcement about how all criminals eventually get caught.

Ultimately, it's impossible to know how good your test is for determining X if you have no ability to cross-check yourself.

This idea is often called the "Toupée fallacy", the idea being people often think all hair toupées look fake because they can always spot them, implicitly ignoring that they are not accounting for the fact that some could be good enough that they are unable to spot them.

Except that this effect mysteriously didn't happen with fake 20 dollar bills! Perhaps we have a fallacy fallacy on our hands.

Well, not entirely, because we also had very expensive machines that ID fakes. We used this when one was suspicious but weren't sure. I dont know how it worked, but it had more sensors and a process of ID'ing bills that I still don't really understand. This is more often then not how we found 20's since usually they were too numerous to scrutinize manually.

So you could try and walk in with a great toupee but I'm gonna suck it off with my expensive vacuum anyway.

This is only a counterargument if you actually put all of the bills through this machine, eventually. Did you do that, perhaps as a final sorting measure?

Otherwise, the ones that were too good to arouse your suspicion were swept through.

Well, eventually all of our money would be sold to this machine. So, yes. Our drawers were only allowed to have some small sum, and usually no large bills.

Well we did. I explained it below if you want to read. But we had a very expensive machine that sorted, scanned, ID'd and stored bills for us. This was our cross-check. I could spot it with our blacklights, back lights, touch - just to double check, I would stick it through the machine and it would spit the bill back to me.

One technique of counterfeiting was to use lower bills, bleach them, and then print on them.

Are American bills all the same size? Euros at least are all different, so you couldn't really do that.

All the same size. We're not very sympathetic to the blind here.

Thats fine, but when I see abraham lincolns face shining through on a $100 bill thats the giveaway.

Yeah use this $10 and no one will think twice: http://i.imgur.com/XInY8HI.jpg

There is no need to wear Frankengloves you can just coat your finger tips with transparent, second skin brand type liquid adhesive bandages so you get the same protection without having creepy looking rubber hands when trying to defraud a coffee shop with monopoly money.

I also liked the US attorney quote "the internet is a dangerous place because it's an open forum.."

Actual, much less objectionable quote;

    The Internet is a dangerous place for law-abiding citizens,
    but because it’s open it’s a forum where criminals can get
    at people and steal their identities or pass counterfeit
    currency.

The internet has clearly made ID theft and wide distribution of counterfeit money easier..

Identity is usually stolen out of garbage cans and mail boxes, or by cronies working at banks and restaurants at least the kind of ID theft where taking out loans and other financial fraud that isn't just ripped database dumps of credit cards. They recently busted a network here that would pay drug addicts to break into mail boxes then use stolen property assessments for loans and false tax returns.

The attorney is correct that the internet just makes it easier for anybody to become criminal with easier access to tools like counterfeit currency when before they had to know somebody in the underground, but even then it wasn't all that difficult. I remember in the mid 1990s my highschool pot dealer used to also sell bricks of counterfeit $10 bills. Before that a kid in my elementary school had an older brother who would mint tokens and he would sell them to us at school to use at arcades and vending machines when the dollar coin was released in 1987. I don't think the internet has really changed anything these kinds of criminal networks always existed.

Identity is often stolen from vulnerable systems as well. Like that huge Target data breach. Those stolen card details end up for sale on carder websites for around a $1 each.

Not really.

In the old days, the only verification were things like city directories that listed the names and occupations of people. Fraud or multiple/stolen identities were pretty trivial.

Running facial recognition on DMV databases has turned up all sorts of people with multiple identities for various reasons.

I assume the hands have a set of human fingerprints built in, and the gloves are used when to you need to use a fingerprint scanner and hide your identity.

So the liquid adhesive wouldn't have worked, but I'm not sure why he couldn't make a set of fake prints using a small rubber mold that would only cover fingertips.

Wells Fargo gave me a fake $100, during my anonymous bitcoin experiment (I tried to buy btc truly anonymously to see how feasible this is). I didn't realize at the time, and processed to spend the bills to get change (a bank can easily record the serials on all cash withdrawals, thus linking my btc purchase). During this whole time, I used several sets of disposable gloves.

When I tried the fake $100, which I didn't know was fake, it looked highly suspicious - buying a $2 tea with gloves and a $100 bill. Fortunately the shopkeep was cool about it. Wells Fargo wasn't. They refused to investigate or refund, and suggested I was lying about the bill and had inserted it.

I'd guess the downside to using just fingertip covers is that while you hide prints, you increase the possibility of leaving DNA via skin cells. Probably not an issue when spending cash, but more of an issue when preparing a package. (Though you need more than just simple gloves; I used a jacket and made sure my forearm was covered, as well as not using any surfaces I previously used).

(Result of my experiment: it's extremely difficult to get Bitcoins anonymously. Opsec is very tough, and LE must be thrilled about stuff moving online and into BTC since it's so easy to get wrong.)

>it's extremely difficult to get Bitcoins anonymously

buy a miner, connect through tor.

I suppose that's possible, but last I looked into it, it was also expensive. If I need $5000 in BTC, how much do I have to spend and how long do I have to wait? Additionally, how many bits of identity do you lose by buying a capable miner?

I'm not sure mining qualifies as "easy", though perhaps not extremely difficult.

For $5000 you can definitely afford a miner. I'm a couple years out of the loop on mining technology and the current & future global hashrate, but with research you could probably get a pretty good estimate on the break even point. An uneducated guess is about a year.

Take a look at Dash (formerly known as darkcoin). It has anonymous mixing built into the protocol. So buying BTC -> dash -> BTC should be able to create anonymous coins. The bits of identity you lose (with this method or buying a miner) only identify you as possible BTC holder, but the actual coins are still untraceable/anonymous.

> At the time, Clock claimed to Ars that he was a Colombian man living in Peru—but he seemed to be able to speak near-flawless English.

The quote immediately following this statement feels very much like ESL to me. No contractions, word order different from a casual native speaker's ("sometimes will" as opposed to "will sometimes").

Possible parallel reconstruction?

My thoughts exactly.

I agree.

The words "confidential informant" are prominent in the FBI press release. Almost to the point of being silly, e.g. "yet another confidential informant". Historically that has already been abused by law enforcement. Pervasive indiscriminate electronic surveillance will only make things worse.

I wish NSA, CIA, NRO et al would do useful things with all the billions they're spending. E.g. where is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? Keeping track of airplane movements would IMO be a much more productive use of their resources than much of what they're currently doing.

Unlikely. The guy was stupid enough to ship the packages with his fingerprints on the contents. That shows a high level of carelessness.

When I used to sell fake IDs and counterfeit credit cards online I always wore gloves and wiped everything down to be safe. You have to be especially careful with tape since it can pull a perfect print very easily.

Does anyone know what the requirements are, and how one would go about making or buying intentionally counterfeit money?

Money that one has no intention of trying to pass off, for stage, filmmaking or live-roleplaying, or similar.

I seem to remember that there are established ways that prop depts mark fake notes as fake so they can be clear they aren't intended to be spent, but does anyone know what the exact legal requirements are?

Is it as simple as just having single-sided notes and not showing the back?

Prop money is almost always at least 1/3 larger than a real bill, and quite often on plain matte paper that's been a bit distressed. At least for stage use.

Priceonomics wrote a good article a while back about prop money: http://priceonomics.com/the-business-of-fake-hollywood-money...

Its idiots like these guys that ruin grey markets and the deepweb for everyone...

I wonder if we'll hit "post-cash" and see all this disappear in our lifetimes: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/cashless_society/2012...

I certainly hope not! A cashless society is the wet dream of those who would turn the world into a panopticon!

It'd add every teensiest financial transaction you ever make to the list of information about you that every major government/company/crime syndicate will have easy access to. No thanks!

(Note that stuff like bitcoin is a form of cash money.)

Ok, yeah, I meant post-tangible currency, but that's just a mouthful.

I was using the English vernacular version of "cash" to refer to stuff you can touch, not the specialized bookkeeping meaning (which could even include diamonds or some artwork in certain situations).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash

I will admit though that the price I set for "knowing everything about my transactions" is roughly around 1% cash back, so as a volunteer to the panopticon, I can't raise too much outrage either way.

I hear you, but certainly can't interpret the linked article in that way. It explicitly mentions the ability to track all transactions as an (if not the) desired effect.

About extended meanings of the term "cash", any serious prepper will have some amount of cheap spirits and maybe cigarettes stockpiled. In the end, these are a kind of consumable emergency cash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money

Some information about the counterfeit bills can be found in a article by Brian Krebs that appeared last year. Related Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203885

Note: even though the Internet & Tor were central to the crime, ordinary police work, including an ordinary warrant, solved it.

No fancy spying or warrantless wiretapping needed. (At least the way they describe it).

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