My only clue is context. I’ve been asked by Tom Hockenhull, senior curator of modern money at The British Museum, to see if I can spot anything amiss. So presumably, to my growing embarrassment as I scour the note, there is something more observant types would spot.
"It’s the silver metallic thread," Hockenhull says, putting me out of my misery. "It probably looked okay to start with but now it’s peeling off."
The early 1990s was in fact particularly tough for those tasked with preventing counterfeit note printing, with outfits typically employing scanners and advanced photocopying equipment rather than the photographic origination for plate making of old. Gangs jailed in Swansea for forging £100,000 worth of cheques, £1m of £20 notes seized in Newbury and £700,000 in Kent. No surprise that banknotes have evolved since to incorporate ever-more sophisticated security features, such as UV symbols, micro-lettering and holograms.
What might surprise many, in light of this, is that similar headlines still hit UK papers today.
In fact, it’s estimated that there are still around 400,000 fake banknotes doing the rounds in the UK, with 719,000 counterfeit Bank of England (BoE) notes withdrawn from circulation last year. In the US, $80.7m (£50m) of counterfeit currency changed hands domestically in 2012, according to the US Secret Service (USSS), and about $14.5m abroad.
This, the USSS points out, is a tiny number relatively speaking, accounting for just 0.01% of the $1.1 trillion of US money in circulation. The BoE makes a similar point.
Film fans
Nonetheless, both would clearly rather this was lower. Central to both the new, long-awaited $100 bill, launched just a couple of weeks ago, and proposals, made last month, for new polymer BoE notes due in 2016, are state-of-the-art security features.
A key reason for joining Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and others in switching to polymer rather than cotton fibre and linen rag, is to enhance durability. But just as important, is security.
"We’ve done a lot of research into different substrates and how difficult they are to counterfeit, and we found polymer was more expensive, more time-consuming and more difficult," says Victoria Cleland, head of notes division at BoE.
"The machines that are used to print onto polymer tend to be very different from your average printer, particularly if you want to put security features on that need heat to apply them – that can go tremendously wrong if you’re dealing with polymer."
Cleland adds that switching to polymer also enables a "clear film window" to be included. "That’s a very important feature of polymer. That is something the general public will easily be able to recognise," she says.
"A lot of counterfeits currently are on just paper, so mostly A4 paper that you use everyday," she continues. "So you can’t create that window very easily unless you cut a hole and insert Sellotape. Also if you’re using complex shaped windows that’s going to be quite difficult to replicate."
Meanwhile, a whole plethora of new anti-counterfeiting measures have been introduced to the new $100 bill. Now being marveled at across the pond, are a raft of ‘tilting’ features such as an ‘100’ foil that changes from copper to green, a security ribbon with 3D bells that change to 100s, and a bell in an inkwell that disappears and reappears.
All pretty impressive, cutting-edge stuff. Which begs the question of whether the UK and US might finally be about to tackle the majority of counterfeiting once and for all.
Currency historian Andrew Gause, doubts it. First off, for the US at least, there’s the apparently somewhat insurmountable issue of state-sponsored forgery.
One colourful but, from the US Federal Reserve’s point of view, embarrassing example of how sophisticated state-sponsored operations can be, stems back to the 1970s, reports Gause.
"Back then anything we could do to make life easy for the Shah of Iran we did, and one of those things was selling them a printing press and sending technicians to calibrate it. And when the Shah fell, the press stayed there. So somewhere in the Baqaar Valley is a Philadelphia grade US printing press," says Gause.
"Boston’s FBI office has discovered these near-perfect counterfeit $100 notes which they traced to the Middle East, and I believe they’re from Iran. I believe we still have currency entering from there at a breakneck pace."
"The state-sponsored people – you’re not stopping those guys," adds Gause. "You can build a better mousetrap but they’ll certainly find a way around it."
As will, believes Gause, the opportunist. The problem, he explains, is that consumer technology, while certainly not the stuff of hi-tech security printing, is getting sophisticated too.
"The advent of printers is the main threat – desktop printing technology is coming on in leaps and bounds," he says. "A 15-year-old kid could walk into a computer store and walk out with a printer that will create a perfect replication of a note. And then scanning technology’s advancing as well. Then, of course, there’s Photoshop."
Gause points to the level of ingenuity small-scale counterfeiters have already employed.
"The new anti-counterfeiting measures are designed to stop this from being a crime of convenience where you can just slap a note on a copy machine, print one out and run down to the store. The number of people managing to forge notes that way is alarming when you see how crude they are, and this should put a stop to that," he says.
"But look at the way people have had enough ingenuity to use a bleaching process. People are using bleaching technology where they chemically remove the ink from authentic currency with a security thread and print that with a higher denomination. That used to be known in the tradition of counterfeiting as ‘upping the note’."
"People have used ‘sandwiching’ where they take care of the watermarking problem by printing the watermark and then laminating the sheets together to give the impression of a watermark," he adds.
Ongoing campaign
The BoE’s Cleland agrees that there’s no way of ever fully stamping out banknote forgery. "I don’t think it’s zero anywhere. If you look back in history, the first counterfeit Bank of England note was produced within a few months of the first note ever coming in," she says.
Not that this means introducing new features is futile. The point, agree Gause and Cleland, is to keep as many steps ahead of the counterfeiter as possible.
Key features of BoE notes that are very hard for people to get right in combination with each other currently, are the special raised intaglio inks, motion strips built in at the paper-making stage and quality printing of intricately rendered characters, says Cleland.
"With characters, people can recognise them and know what to look for and if someone has missed out one of Shakespeare’s eyes, that’s more immediately obvious than a brick missing from a bridge," she says.
"And we ensure the quality of print is extremely high. We have very detailed specifications. De La Rue, who print all of our notes, know what those are, and they involve fractions of millimeters."
Gause and The British Museum’s Hockenhull would add a further, all-important, reason for adding more and more visual signifiers of a genuine article, even when the forger will inevitably get wise to these.
"Our entire system is based on confidence. If we shake this, that could cause a run on the bank or a distrust of currency. So above all else whenever they bring in anti-counterfeiting changes, they want to make them recognisable to the general public," says Gause.
You only have to look at the design of banknotes to realise, says Huckenhull, that as important as discouraging counterfeiters, is showing this is being done.
"The design of notes is inherently conservative – note design evolved when there weren’t computers or UV scanners, so it evolved to incorporate uncomplicated measures and has to retain these to retain the public’s confidence," he says.
The line the BoE and Federal Reserve tread is, then, a fine one in providing enough information to instill confidence, but not enough to enable replication of notes.
But the surprising truth is that counterfeit money printing will probably never be entirely stamped out. By adding ever-more whizzy security features, the likes of the BoE and Federal Reserve aim to stay as many steps ahead of fraudsters as possible. But, perhaps more importantly, they aim to demonstrate that forgers now have more than a metallic thread to contend with.
I still might not be able to detect a counterfeit fiver printed today. But, whether I consciously realise why this is or not, I also have no urge to rush to the bank. So in this way the holograms, watermarks, raised printing and holographic strips of today are doing a pretty good job.
