#FunFactFriday 💡✨ Did you know that copying, scanning, or even Photoshopping currency on most modern equipment is nearly impossible? 🖨️💵 It’s true! 😲✋
Thanks to advanced technology, our modern copiers, scanners, and image processing programs are smarter than ever. They can recognize the intricate patterns and security features embedded in banknotes, ultimately refusing to process the image 😮🚫🖼️
Imagine trying to copy a dollar bill with your fancy scanner, hoping to print some quick money! 💸💸 But alas, the banknote patterns would be detected, and your machine would hold up its virtual hand and say, “Sorry, can’t do that!” 🤷♂️🤚
The ingenious patterns on our currency act as guardians 👮♀️🌟, safeguarding against counterfeiting. They’re designed with complex ink patterns, watermarks, and optical features that digital devices can distinguish 🕵️🔍✨.
So, next time you come across a multi-functional printer or scanner, just remember: it’s not as simple as hitting the copy button and creating your own pool of cash. 💰💥💔
I worked as a printer for more than 30 years, including owning my own shop for more than half that time. ALL new hires in my shop were shown and warned about my ZERO strikes policy if they tried to counterfeit money. Even still, my shop was twice tossed by the Secret Service when someone succumbed to the temptation. In addition to the printers being SUPER smart at detecting such attempts, if the printer is networked it also sends a report to the Secret Service which then decides if it warrants taking action. As IF all that’s no already enough, the same super smart printers also embed a nearly invisible, almost impossible to see, unique to that printer “printer mark” that allows the Secret Service to trace any such attempts to that specific printer.
Only the Feds get to print money like there’s no tomorrow
Can one 3D print money with the same result?
When I was a kid, my dad took me to his office while he worked on a saturday. This is way before iphones or really any sort of portable entertainment beyond a book.
Being bored as hell I explored the office and ran across a color xerox machine. It didn’t take long before I figured out how to photocopy a $1 bill, front and back, perfectly lined up. $1000 later my dad checked on me and went nuclear. On the plus side I never had to spend another saturday at his office.
If that was true, how did they make the image in the post?
It’s not impossible to print Monopoly money though. That way I can pwn my kids no matter how good they are
I actually found this out by trying to scan the patterns on Canadian currency to use in digital art (honest to goodness, I am not interested in forgery). My printer stopped in the middle of the scan and an error popped up saying I couldn’t do that…so I was forced to find cool textures and patterns elsewhere..
Wow. Secret service should keep that stuff shhhhh
[You’re allowed to print an image if you scale it. ](https://i.imgur.com/lM4bgEi.png)
75% or 150% size – single sided only – destroy the method (image files) when finished.
I’ve tried to test that out before. I’ve never had a problem scanning a bill or opening it in photoshop.
They can prevent forgery but they can’t actually allow you to change the ink cartridge without dyeing your hands or breaking the whole damn thing.
Probably a US thing, cause here in South Africa you can make a copy of a R200 note. It’s still illegal, but our printers and scanners don’t freak out.
If you use old hardware you can do it. I tried scanning dollars when I got my first scanner in the mid 90s, probably an old parallel port flatbed and it copied them perfectly and printed an excellent image on an old HP laser printer, although it was in black only so an obvious fake.
I found out the Photoshop one the hard way
Was gonna shop some characters into the dollar bill for le funni
Got flagged immediately by Abode and was sent to a website explaining why I’ve been a naughty boi
What is looked for is called the EURion constellation, based on its first notable appearance on Euro banknotes.
It’s a slightly offset X drawn from five of the zeros in those little patterns on the back.
Note also that it’s commercial software that complied with the EURion detection rules; open source software does not.
Well this is weird. Some woman was just arrested for printing fake currency somewhere in Africa.
Apparently she used a Canon Pixma colour printer, do with that information what you will.
[How mom made fake money](https://www.iol.co.za/thepost/news/how-mom-made-fake-money-8105023e-a93f-42ad-bf79-c10ab129c849)
And it only stops the terrible counterfeits that wouldn’t fool anyone anyways 😂 Most of the high-level counterfeiters use intaglio or offset printing techniques which has very little software involved
Australia first $100 dollar bills came out in 1984 about the same time as colour Xerox copiers. Shenanigans ensued.
I know my dog and his brother may have printed some fake money in the early 2000’s before the stupid Canadian mint decided to put foil strips on the bills and now we have plastic monopoly money but anyways the older dog’s stupid friend used it two days in a row at the same place and got caught while the younger one continued to buy $1 chocolate bars with funny money at every corner store within a 20min bus ride and pocket all the change.
So like if you want to photoshop it in a way that is a joke it still wouldn’t let you? That kinda sucks. Like maybe as long as you changed enough about it so that it clearly couldn’t pass as currency thet could lighten up
Laughs in actual computer literacy.
It only detected bills. Copy your coins at will
I have none of the skills necessary to photoshop currency, no need to photoshop currency, think it is smart to put these restrictions in place, and somehow…feel a bit indignant that you can’t photoshop currency.
/me laughs in mid 90’s gimp source code.
impossible isn’t the right choice of words, a little inconvenient maybe
I was a senior manager in the service department of a major manufacturer. People who had information on the system (not me) had to sign an NDA. I was able to infer a lot of information about how the system worked based on machine behavior and systems management.
I do not think the serial number was sent anywhere when currency was detected. That would not do much good, as the machine could copy without an Internet connection. Our machines printed a nearly black copy if you copied currency and threw an error if you scanned currency. You could copy currency in monochrome or enlarged by a certain amount: this was necessary for law enforcement as part of a process to document evidence in some cases.
Based on external sources, I believe that our machines printed a pattern of yellow dots (too faint to see unaided) on every image, which encoded the serial number. We did get contacts from the federal government asking us where a serial was sold: presumably printed images were evidence in an investigation.
The system would occasionally give false positives on copies that were not currency. Since the system was not well documented to resellers, these errors would reach us as apparent machine failures (eg a service problem). Based on the false positives that I saw, I believed that the currency recognition was done by making a histogram of the color distribution in the sample image and it would reject the copy if the histogram was close enough to a stored value for currency. Remember the machines have limited extra processing power and they need to do the currency recognition in real time while making a copy, so they cannot do anything too complex. And they have been doing this since about 1998 at least, so the pattern matching at that time had to be compatible with computing power available then. The method might have changed over time but I was seeing this behavior when I was in a position where these problems reached me.
The machine serial number was stored in multiple places and specific servicing procedures had to be followed to preserve it. If it was lost, the machine was bricked. A few people under NDA knew how to restore a machine to operation after this happened. Not me.
Note that I can only make these disclosures because I was not under an NDA. This is based on inferences I made from what I saw happen, not actual documentation.
I feel like if I tried something like this, or search for further proof, it’ll get me put on a list.
Or you could just move to polymer bank notes and not worry about people printing fake currency.
Shitty article. It’s called the Eurion constellation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Fun fact: GIMP has no such restriction.
GIMP is based.
Freedom is awesome.