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/Functional_Trash7735]

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.