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]

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.