Canadian Funny Money

Good Morning All,

Can't sleep so up for some surfing and just found another funny money story. Amazing what people will try, eh?

I have never gotten a fake bill in my life that I'm aware of. How about you?

Karmen (can't afford to get fake money so I would be extremely choked if I ever did and was out that money! Argh)

Fake bills reuse holograms taken off real currency: RCMP
Counterfeiters defeating security device
BILL MAH, CanWest News Service

Published: 1 hour ago

Peel-and-paste is the new technique some crooks are using to overcome the high-tech holographic security features on Canadian currency.

Counterfeiters are stripping the holographic stripes from genuine $5, $10 and $20 notes and gluing them onto phoney $20, $50 and $100 bills, the RCMP say.

Most of the bogus bills are popping up in Alberta, but some have also appeared in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

The brazen criminals have even tried to return the real notes from which they have removed the stripes to banks, to demand replacement bills.

"Someone's always going to try something, and it was a matter of time, I guess," said Sgt. Kerry Petryshyn, the Mounties' Ottawa-based national counterfeit co-ordinator.

RCMP issued an alert after noticing in July there was a spike in use of the "altered counterfeit" technique - relatively uncommon compared with other currency scams.

Police know of about 450 altered bills distributed across Canada since 2005. Of the 67 discovered this year, 45 came in last month - and 85 per cent of those were passed in Edmonton and Calgary.

Police have made no arrests so far but they believe the bills come from a single source - either one person or an organized crime group.

Aside from their security stripes, the phoney bills are poor-quality fakes run off on an ink-jet printer on cheap paper. The colours look off and they'll run at the first drop of water.

Petryshyn said criminals are exploiting people's tendency to rely too much on one security feature, such as the holographic stripe. "What's unique about it is it's costly and time-consuming.

"For a $50 counterfeit, they're sacrificing a $5 bill, plus whatever other expenses they have for inks and printing." But investigators are shaking their heads over a new twist on the scam. "We've been getting some (fake) $20s and $10s that actually have a genuine $20 or $10 holographic stripe on them." Edmonton Journal