Have you ever wondered when and who first thought of counterfeiting money? Interestingly, counterfeit money has existed as a phenomenon for just as long as regular money has existed. Humanity has always been inventive, and there have been people prone to deception. In fact, counterfeiting coins is one of the first types of fraud. If the reader wants to hear specific numbers, then even in ancient civilizations there was counterfeiting several millennia ago.
Agree that this is a rather interesting topic. That is why in this article we propose to talk about it in more detail. The text will consider history of counterfeit money, the development of fraudulent technologies in this area, the most high-profile cases of counterfeiting and how to distinguish money from fakesIt will be interesting!
Counterfeit money history
Coins
When were the first counterfeit money? Of course, it is impossible to name the exact date, but if we talk about the oldest recorded cases, then even in Ancient China and Lydia (modern-day Turkey), where the first metal coins began to be minted in the 7th century BC, there were already cases when some people were engaged in counterfeiting these same coins. Even then, such a problem existed.
How was it? Coins were minted in those days not of very high quality, so it was easy to counterfeit them. A copy could even be of higher quality, if there was such a desire. If we talk about the first counterfeit money, then the whole principle of counterfeiting was to replace one material with another, cheaper one. For example, while real coins were made of pure gold (with a very small percentage of other elements), counterfeits were made by mixing precious metals with copper or other impurities, which made it possible to obtain a cheaper analogue. Thus, if we try to answer the question "Where did the first counterfeit money appear?", then this is Ancient China and the territory of modern Turkey.
Over time, the problem of counterfeiting became more and more serious. For example, in the Roman Empire, counterfeiting of money became so widespread that the authorities repeatedly introduced severe penalties for counterfeiters, including the death penalty. Of course, this did not stop the fraudsters. Someone was punished, and someone managed to make counterfeits quite skillfully and not get caught by the authorities.
It is interesting how the inhabitants of Medieval Europe approached the counterfeiting of coins. It was like this: the edges of real gold or silver coins were filed down, and new coins were made from the metal shavings. It was impossible to detect a counterfeit, because it was essentially no different from the original. Of course, it was possible to take measurements, but back then the standards were not as strict as they are now, and everything was done by hand, so even real coins could differ significantly from each other, which only made it more difficult to detect a fake.
Banknotes
The advent of paper banknotes could stop mass counterfeiting, because now there were many different tools and opportunities to protect money from counterfeiting. Be that as it may, but for inventive fraudsters this did not become a problem. With the advent of paper money in the 13th century in China, counterfeiting simply took on a new form. After 300 years, paper banknotes began to appear in Europe, for example, in Sweden, France and England. Even the most complex banknotes were quite successfully counterfeited. As a result, the authorities of many countries even had to return to the proven experience of their ancestors to somehow combat this problem - the introduction of the death penalty.
The most high-profile cases of counterfeit money
Let's start with the Russian Empire, which had similar problems in the 19th century. Counterfeit banknotes were so widespread that the authorities were forced to repeatedly change the design of the banknotes. Interestingly, they were manufactured abroad. The most common were products of Polish and Ottoman manufacture.
It is also worth mentioning the counterfeiting of World War II. We are talking about the so-called Operation Bernhard. Its essence is that Nazi Germany counterfeited British pounds on a large scale, which were to be used to undermine the economy of Great Britain. This case is interesting because the counterfeiting here was not for enrichment. The goal was to weaken the enemy.
We cannot fail to mention the so-called “superdollars”. Even today, it is not known exactly who was involved in their production. We are talking about mass counterfeiting of US dollars, which were so perfect that even professionals could not recognize them without special equipment. Hence the name “superdollars”. Most likely, some international criminal groups were behind this, because American banknotes are very well protected and counterfeiting them is a very difficult task.
In the 2000s, the Italian mafia established a large-scale production of counterfeit euros. Entire factories operated to produce them. The point here, too, was not to get rich, because the mafia never had any problems with this anyway. Most likely, the counterfeits were used for illegal operations and money laundering.
Combating counterfeiting
The experience of combating such practices throughout history has varied greatly. Some have simply imposed fines, others have imposed imprisonment, and others have imposed the death penalty as a sanction for such a crime. If we talk about the present, counterfeiting money, as before, remains a serious crime. Now, sophisticated technologies are actively used to protect money from counterfeiting: watermarks, holograms, microtexts, security threads, and changing colors of ink. And all this works, but from time to time there are "talented" people who manage to bypass all these restrictions and create a counterfeit that will pass all checks. After that, you have to come up with something else.
Let's summarize
As we see, history of counterfeiting is quite interesting and dates back to long before our era. The struggle between criminals and states has been going on for thousands of years. It is like a struggle in the wild between predator and prey, where both sides are constantly evolving. Today, electronic money has begun to be used quite actively, but this has not become a problem for fraudsters and scammers. They, as before, find various methods and ways to deceive the system and profit.
