Increasingly sophisticated techniques with counterfeiters are throwing up a huge challenge to authorities and money exchange houses with to forge notes with most of the security features used in real currencies, said forensic experts in Dubai. The Indian rupee has emerged as the currency of choice, overtaking the US dollar in 2011 by currency forgers, accounting for 10,700 [...]
January 1, 2012 marked the 10-year anniversary of the euro, a singular currency that services 17 countries throughout Europe, but there is little to celebrate. Marred by what the European Commission deemed “fiscal and macroeconomic imbalances built up over the decade,” many financial analysts say the euro is in trouble. Countries such as Ireland, Spain [...]
It used to be a highly refined skill requiring substantial training and reserved for specialized technicians, but today counterfeiting is as easy as “the push of a button” say sources from the US federal government – and this is leading to a big jump in the amount of counterfeit banknotes in circulation. The US Secret [...]
Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov was presented with a special award from Europol this weekend for his role in eliminating a counterfeit ring earlier this month. The counterfeiters, who were set up in a small shop near a pig farm in Central Bulgaria, possessed highly sophisticated forging equipment and were printing fake euro and US [...]
In an effort to fight identity theft and fraud, the UK has unveiled a new electronic passport complete with heightened security features and a revamped design. Though the previous UK passport was already equipped with a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip – the device that makes an electronic passport electronic (read more here) – the [...]
*This article is the last in a three-part series on counterfeiting. Read the first two articles in the series: Part 1, Part 2 Anti-counterfeiting technology in and on banknotes has been evolved more over the past 30 years than it has in the entire history of money. Today’s banknotes are not just used as currency; [...]
*This article is the second in a three-part series on counterfeiting. In the world of currency, developing anti-counterfeiting measures have always followed the emergence of counterfeit banknotes and coins, and they have taken on many different forms. As seen in the previous article in this series, (read: Part 1: A History of Counterfeiting), one of [...]
*This article is the first in a three-part series on counterfeiting. The act of counterfeiting is as old as money itself. Plaguing ancient Rome, empirical China, newborn America, and many other nations over the past 2500 years, the illegal activity came hand in hand with the creation of money. Even prior to the invention of [...]
The European Central Bank (ECB) announced today that the number of fake euro banknotes seized in the last six months rose by eight per cent from the first half of the year. “In the second half of 2009 a total of 447,000 counterfeit euro banknotes were withdrawn from circulation,” an ECB statement said. Though the [...]
India will put together a ‘financial terror dossier’ this week in an attempt to garner international support in pressuring Pakistan to immobilize a booming counterfeit currency ring that exports bogus Indian banknotes into the country. Since the attacks in Mumbai last November, India has been aggressively building a number of cases against the neighboring Pakistan, [...]