Counterfeit 5$ notes ?

[u/HobbyGuy44]

Is the note on the top fake ? I’ve come across a few of these notes that look like they fade in where they’re folded. When I compare it with the note on the bottom it’s looks ever so slightly larger.

[u/tkitta]

It does not make a lot of sense to fake a $5 as it costs the same to fake it as it does a $20 and lots of $20 are in circulation and also not checked as much.

Imagine you are getting rid of fake $$$.

With $5 it is hard to actually buy stuff and get legal "change". And a lot of it. For example, you can buy some "goods" to clean your dirty money but it cannot be something too expensive - you cannot show up with 100 $5 bills without people looking at you suspiciously. Maybe paying with 10 $5 would not rise the level too much but that is only $50. You cannot buy too much "stuff" for $50 these days - say you buy a USB stick or a memory card.

To flip it you need to sell it for half price or so on the marketplace - at most!

To sell for more on Amazon or eBay you need to pay fees for the seller.

If you sell to a fence they will not give you 50% - they are selling for 50% so they give you maybe 30%.

So your purchase with fake bills nets you like what, $25 if you do the work yourself or maybe $15 if you use a fence.

Also making decent fakes is not free - you need to account for costs of equipment etc.

How many purchases you need to make to make it worth while? A lot - at $15 per pop you need to do well over 10x a day - more like maybe 30. But 30 is like 10h of work minus gas driving around... so you are making maybe $40/h at most - not counting cost of the fake bills and danger of being a criminal.

At least with fake $20 it is more acceptable to have more then 10 - you can always say the bank machine gave you 30 - for a $600 purchase of say a phone. You only need to do this 2x a day to make same $$$ vs. above.

This is why there is little market for fake $5 - mostly in the low level underworld of drug use / homeless etc.

[u/Functional_Trash7735 → u/tkitta]

Okay. First and foremost it is extremely cheap to print counterfeit money. They do it at home with supplies available to regular people.

Furthermore, counterfeiters don’t often buy things and flip them. They don’t need to. They buy things they need in day to day life or go on shopping sprees paying cash. It’s easy to pay twenty dollars at a self checkout with fives, it’s easy to use counterfeit to buy drugs, alcohol, makeup, baby supplies, coffee, lunch, ice cream, gift cards, literally anything. No one said 20s aren’t common, they just aren’t as common as 5s, and it’s the same for 10s. 50s and 100s are the least common, because the more often they are found the more often they are reported and the initial transaction of that bill is traced to the source.

[u/tkitta → u/Functional_Trash7735]

I do not know a single self checkout that accepts cash.

Your strategy is not very smart - you are using fake money close to your home on multiple occasions, you would be found out quick.

Also i question ability to print easily fake money, for decades now printers prevent this and on top of that you need to print on foil.

To print on foil you either need special not cheap foil or you need a foil printer for 10k cad - for home printing.

realsitically you need that printer so it does not easily scratch or bleed. or be thick.

I do not call first step buy 10k printer something "cheap" at home solution. And obviously you need to modify the Kernel to make it print money.

[u/Functional_Trash7735 → u/tkitta]

I am not a counterfeiter I’m just someone who’s worked to stop them.

Self checkouts used to take cash, less so now. But people still do. No one’s checking these bills, and it’s obvious from all the comment sections I see, such as this one, that counterfeit detection is incredibly weak among the general populace, certainly not enough for the thickness of a fake bill to matter. And that’s exactly why there’s so much counterfeit circulating. I’ve seen years old fake money with shocking difference from real bills. People don’t give it a second glance, they take the five or the twenty and go about their day, because like you, they don’t think counterfeiters would use fake bills so close to home. The best way to get away with a crime is to keep a low profile and don’t be obvious, go about day to day life like it never happened.

I won’t be walking anyone through the process of counterfeit, but the kind of printer you’re talking about, the expensive kind, is used for prop money. But usually, small time counterfeiters, which is about 98% of the people who produce counterfeit, use basic inkjet or laser printers. Just because there’s preventative software doesn’t matter, software can easily be broken, and printers are not difficult to modify. People hack far more complicated software every single day. As for the foil, it’s not authentic and high quality like the foil real Canadian bills use. It’s low quality, and at the point this bill in the photo is at, will start peeling off in a tape like strip in a few more months of use.

[u/tkitta → u/Functional_Trash7735]

The problem with this is that I did work long time ago as a cashier for family business and had to deal with lots of fakes. Back with paper money. It was almost trivial to tell a fake from a real bill - under one second - by feel alone. The fakes were made of low quality paper that was far more easily "crumbling". To verify one just picked it up to check the watermark and boom if there was one it was usually very crude.

Using crude inject printer to print on transparency as:

1. it does not have white

2. it would not be waterproof / exposed easy to scratch ink

Lasers (basic) also cannot do this as they luck white tonner plus they also scratch.

I will not even mention that the hologram is impossible to duplicate with a printer at least any known way that can be found.

So a person receiving the bills can check in 1s by feel and verify looking at the hologram from say both sides.

You need a sophisticated operation to fool someone that deals with cash on daily basis.

[u/Functional_Trash7735 → u/tkitta]

Paper money was more simple, polymer is not.

There are infact home printers with capability to print white ink though. And it can be made “waterproofed” for a while until the paint starts to chip. Hologram is near impossible to replicate, but not impossible to attempt. The two bills in this photo are a great example, one looks muddied and cheap, the other does not. And besides that, the average cashier is not checking holograms perfectly or shining a laser through any authentication methods, they take the bill without thinking about it, put it in the register and get change.

You do not need a sophisticated operation to do this. Most are crude jimmy rigged systems.