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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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