Counterfeiting money easier than ever

By The Beacon-News
Published: January 13th, 2012

Counterfeiting is nothing new, but thanks to technology, some of the counterfeiters likely are, according to local law enforcement officials.

Police chiefs from area suburbs, as well as officials from the Secret Service — the federal agency responsible for fighting counterfeiting — say individuals are using their home computers and today’s sophisticated graphics software to print phony bucks.

“With the technology available out here now, high school kids can make believable currency,” Country Club Hills Police Chief William Brown said. “We’re going to keep our antennas up.”

Sometimes, those antennas work well despite the counterfeiters’ high-tech efforts. The Secret Service made 3,028 counterfeiting arrests nationwide in the past year and helped remove more than $261 million in fake money from circulation, according to the agency’s annual report.

About 63 percent of the counterfeit money was produced using digital printing means, compared with less than 1 percent in 1995, the report said.

Derrick Golden, the assistant to the special agent in charge of Chicago’s Secret Service office, calls the growing class of phony money makers “leisure counterfeiters.”

“You have the high school kid or college kid in the dorm room experimenting with it,” Golden said. “They may get brave enough to see if they can pass it at a store.”

While counterfeiting may have come a long way from the days of people taping the corners of high-denomination bills over singles or sticking one fake bill in a handful of real ones, suspected counterfeiters still are getting caught.

In November, a Chicago woman was charged after an incident in Orland Park when police found nearly $1,500 in fake bills in the car in which she was a passenger.

The woman was charged after attempting to use counterfeit $20 bills to buy $500 worth of items from Macy’s at the Orland Square Mall, police said. Officers said they also found in the car about $800 worth of merchandise from the Express and Victoria’s Secret stores in the mall that had been bought using counterfeit money, and $1,460 in additional counterfeit bills.

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