Counterfeit Money Detection is a Matter of National Security

It has been somewhat of an open secret that North Korea is the single biggest manufacturer of American dollar “supernotes” - $100 bills so perfectly replicated, they can be mistaken for the real thing by all but the most professional of observers. North Korea began their operations well over a decade ago, yet it has only been in recent years that we started to see the full extent of these counterfeiting efforts and the grave and growing danger it represents to the U.S.

In October 2004, a ship container under watch by the FBI arrived in Newark, NJ. It held over $330,000 in superdollars, and was just the tip of the counterfeit iceberg. A second shipment holding almost ten times as much – approximately $3 million worth of supernotes – arrived two months later, and a third one with $2 million went on order, according to the Department of Justice indictments. The notes were traced back through Chinese and Russian distribution centers to North Korea, and represented a growing wave of professionally crafted counterfeit $100s coming in from that region. At the time of the arrests, the total value of North Korean supernotes and other counterfeit products was estimated by the U.S. government at half a billion dollars. 

That many counterfeits floating around can ruin any business, but the larger goal of North Korea is to flood the States with counterfeit $100’s and bring down the economy as a whole. The campaign is not unprecedented: as we noted in a June post on our blog, economic warfare has gone hand-in-hand with actual combat since at least the Revolutionary War days. Indeed, under American law, a foreign nation counterfeiting dollars is still considered to be engaging in an act of war.

Protecting against these supernotes is not just good for your business, but a way to contribute to the safety of the nation's economy. But the government has experts trained to detect counterfeit notes; what can you, without that training, do? You can look at all the security features present on the dollars (we designed a comprehensive list of such features in a three part series back in June). However, the supernotes are printed on magenta ink very closely resembling U.S. dollar green, and have the same intaglio printing. To take the uncertainty out of detection, pick up one of our CT-550 scanners. We have tested them against stacks and stacks of Korean supernotes and other counterfeits from the four corners of the globe, and are proud to say we've gotten perfect results every time. Every single counterfeit put in was immediately detected and rejected.

Protect your business and defend against economic attackers. Get the CT-550 and never worry about finding fake bills again.