There are about 100 million dollars in counterfeit banknotes in the world, and, as informed In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sean Ferrari, chief commercial officer of Currency Research and a former Federal Reserve employee, said that about 12% of this is “movie money,” which was legally printed for filming but ended up in circulation.
According to him, such banknotes are created for films, TV series and commercials - with mandatory markings like For motion pictures use only. However, some of these banknotes leak into the system and are used to try to pay in shops, cafes and vending machines.
In 2019, the US Secret Service admitted that some of these bills were convincing enough to fool not only people but also cash-receiving devices.
Against the backdrop of this case, the question becomes particularly important: how is the dollar protected - the largest and most widely used currency in the world, with more than 55 billion banknotes in circulation? Sean Ferrari, who worked for 16 years at the Fed, told the WSJ that the protection of American banknotes is based on three levels.
The first is designed to deter the least skilled counterfeiters.
"The simplest means is the very tactility of the banknote: its special sound when it is bent and its characteristic texture," — he noted. The bill is made of a secret blend of cotton and linen, and recreating that feel is half the battle. Some counterfeits are made on real banknote paper — for example, criminals wash the ink off a $5 and print a $100 on top. In response, many countries have switched to polymer banknotes with a characteristic “plastic” bend.
Second level of protection is focused on automatic verification against more advanced counterfeits, designed, for example, to deceive terminals and ATMs. Magnetic ink is used, which creates patterns that are recognized by sensors. But, as Ferrari notes, it is possible to bypass even such systems - it is enough to find out what exactly the machine is looking for and imitate only this feature. Sometimes fraudsters manage to force the machines to accept even blank paper if the magnetic response matches.
Third level — is an invisible protection known only to the central bank itself. It can include molecular components, a reaction to a certain light or laser, special chemical properties. This technology is a kind of "last line of defense", which is used, among other things, to recognize the so-called supernotes — high-quality counterfeits that the United States in the 2000s associated, in particular, with North Korea.
Historically, counterfeiting currency has also been used as a tool of war: in the 1940s, Nazi Germany printed millions of fake pounds sterling to undermine the British economy.
However, even the most advanced protection is useless if a person does not use it. Many buyers and cashiers do not visually check banknotes, and vending machines react to only one sign, the expert notes.
That’s why central banks have begun to introduce new technologies, such as microlenses that create 3D effects. Switzerland, for example, was one of the first to introduce most modern security features, from transparent windows to color-changing ink and microprinting. The country costs an average of 45 cents to print a banknote, and in 2024, more than 41 million new banknotes were issued.
In this context, it is particularly noteworthy that the US one-dollar bill has not changed its design in more than 60 years, Ferrari says. At the same time, there are almost 15 billion $1 bills in circulation.
The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing says the low-denomination bill is rarely counterfeited, and updating the design would be prohibitively expensive and logistically complex around the world where the dollar is a reserve currency. There is also a federal ban on redesigning the $1 to maintain trust in the dollar as a symbol of stability.
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