By JOE LAMBE
The Kansas City Star
The Secret Service agent in Kansas City peered hard at a counterfeit $100 bill, ran a finger over it and grimaced in disgust.
It was bad, ugly work.
“Too slick, too,” said Charles Green, special agent in charge.
More counterfeiters are using today’s ink-jet printers, computers and copiers to make money that’s just good enough to pass, he said, even though their product is awful.
In the past, he said, the best American counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out decent 20s, 50s and 100s. Now that kind of work is rare and almost all comes from abroad.
Among American thieves, the 22-year veteran said sadly, “it’s a lost art.”
But as art fades, greed goes on. Ink-jet counterfeiting is thriving.
Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even many police officers don’t know what they’re supposed to look like.
Moreover, many people see paper money less because they use credit or debit cards.
The result: Ink-jet counterfeiting accounted for 60 percent of $103 million in fake money removed from circulation from October 2007 to August 2008, the Secret Service reports. In 1995, the figure was less than 1 percent.
No other kind hits the Kansas City area, Green said, except a rare “floater” fake that comes in from New York or some other coastal metropolis.
Counterfeiting is a constant problem that gets worse during a slow economy. The 15 Secret Service agents in Kansas City collect an average of $300,000 in fake bills in the metro area each year, he said.
But Green shook his head. Some fake bills nowadays are for $5 and $10 — even $1.
“It’s crazy.”
An era passes
Green pointed to a picture hanging in his downtown conference room. It’s a photo from a 1980s Lenexa case that involved heavy printing presses and about 2 million fake dollars.
“That’s what we used to see,” he boomed. “That’s the kind of case we used to make.”
Agents discovered then that someone had purchased such equipment and a special kind of paper and it all went to the Lenexa shop. Then the agents secretly went in there with a court order and planted a tiny video camera on a Playboy calendar.
They streamed video 24/7 for days, stormed in with guns drawn and sent bad guys to federal prison.
Green’s voice sank as he described today’s sad-sack counterfeiters.
These people call up pictures of bills on their computers, buy paper at an office supply store and print out a few bills. They cut the bills apart, go into a store or bar and pass one or two.
Many offenders are involved with drugs, he said, often methamphetamine. If they get caught, so little money is involved that federal prosecutors won’t take the case.
State prosecutors might convict them and get some time behind bars, but the charge is usually something like forgery. So it is not clear they were counterfeiters if they do it again.
The Secret Service is lobbying Kansas, Missouri and other states to create state charges of counterfeiting. Federal and state authorities need to work together more as printers and copiers get better and thieves gain skill, Green said.
An old problem
President Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service in 1865 to deal with a crisis: One-third of the nation’s money was counterfeit.
Now the fake rate is .02 percent, or one in every 10,000 bills, Green said, but that could easily get worse.
To reach Joe Lambe, call 816-234-7714 or send e-mail to jlambe@kcstar.com.
Next page >Report comment as: (required) X Obscenity/vulgarity Hate speech Personal attack Advertising/Spam Copyright/Plagiarism Other Remarks: (optional)
Original Post