- [Reporter] Counterfeit money is an important weapon
of the saboteur.
- [Jonathon] Throughout time,
counterfeit currency has played a vital role
in the history of the United States.
- [Reporter] To banks, and other financial institutions,
Secret Service offers instruction
in how to detect spurious money.
There are always minute differences obvious
to the trained eye which make detection possible.
- Since the Secret Service inception,
they have worked tirelessly
to suppress counterfeit currency.
[suspenseful music]
A lot of people are unaware
that the United States Secret Service
was formed during The Civil War in response to the rising
of counterfeit currency that was being printed
by the Confederate Army and distributed in the North.
When we talk about counterfeit currency,
what we're talking about isn't something
that you print at home,
we're talking about a very high-level artistic formation
of Federal Reserve notes.
Notes that are so undetectable to the common person,
and they're very oftentimes not even picked up in banks.
During World War II,
Hitler and the Nazis tried the same methodology.
They forced Jewish artisans to create counterfeit currency
to try to destabilize the U.S. dollar globally,
all of those attempts failed.
Their experts in genuine currency said they were able
to secure the Treasury and the U.S. financial institutions
from this impact of counterfeit currency.
In major financial regions of the United States,
hundreds of thousands of dollars of counterfeit currency
are seized every week.
The role of the Secret Service is to suppress
that counterfeit count and ensure
that those bills don't continue circulating
through the U.S. economy.
Incorporated into every Federal Reserve note
are certain security features.
Some of those security features remain classified
and are closely guarded secrets of the U.S. Government.
Here, we're looking at a 20 and $100 Federal Reserve note.
Both have watermarks that are printed into the paper itself.
A process that's developed when the paper stock is made
and it's embedded into the fibers.
It's not a print,
it's actually an imprint into the paper itself.
Additionally, a common feature that is seen
with the naked eye,
is present in the lower right-hand corner
of the 20 and the $100 bill,
and it's called optical varying ink.
It's image shifting ink that changes color
as the bill moves.
Microprinting is fine, fine artistic work,
that's embedded in the genuine plate,
and what that means is you can't take a bill
and photocopy it and have it have
the same quality in the microprinting,
it'll come through as just a straight line.
That's a key indicator that it would be a counterfeit bill.
One feature on the $100 bill,
if you look very finely printed on the lapel of Franklin,
is microprinting, it says the United States of America.
Very hard to see with the naked eye,
but under magnification, it's another security feature.
An finally, embedded are colored fibers,
red, blue, and there's also some that glow with UV lighting.
These are key indicators of a genuine bill.
On the higher denomination bills,
there's a 3D hologram strip that's imprinted into
the fiber itself that is again,
another indicator of a genuine bill.
Every bill from the one to the 100,
has a serial number,
that serial number for the Secret Service
is used as a tracking device.
We know what genuine bills look like
and we know what their serial number and sequence are.
Counterfeiters don't, necessarily.
So oftentimes,
a bill that does not follow a specific sequence
are a key indicator of a counterfeit Federal Reserve note.
Every genuine Federal Reserve note is associated
to a Federal Reserve bank,
that is indicated on the bill via specific locations here.
Oftentimes counterfeiters don't align the bill
to the right Federal Reserve Bank,
again, a key indicator of a counterfeit bill.
Counterfeiters seek to undermine the credibility
of the U.S. financial system by just the sheer manufacturing
of counterfeit currency.
The Secret Service, mindful of the impact that this has,
they've worked with the Department of the Treasury
to come up with security standards
that are inherent in every bill.