When the first gold coin was struck, someone with criminal intent must have said, "I can make one of these out of ordinary metal that looks like gold and use it to buy things." It just can't be helped, there are some people that will do anything, no matter how morally reprehensible, to turn a profit. Some counterfeiters even think of themselves as artists and indeed some of their work shows that they are. It is a shame that they have turned their talents to crime.

In the early days of the U.S., counterfeiting was relatively easy because there were so many different bills around,.There were thousands of different bank notes. Ben Franklin looked at the problem and developed a method of making a copy of real leaves in lead, in 1739, that could be used to be printed on money. It was until the 1960's that his process that he called natural print was figured out.

Today the modern U.S. bank note or bill, has many different safeguards built into it to make it more difficult to counterfeit. Notice I say more difficult not impossible. Special paper is used, it is made from a special blend of cotton and linen. It has a special yellowish green tint. The paper is embedded with red and blue fibers. There are security threads that run the width of the bill. The denomination of a bill can be figured out by this thread. Every bill has a watermark. Now you would think that all this would stop counterfeiting, it doesn't. One intrepid group of counterfeiters decided that since the real paper that is used in bills was not available anywhere, they would bleach one dollar bills until they became blank and then used them to print higher denomination bills on. Now they had all the ingredients of a real bill except the strip or thread that ran the width of the bill was incorrect, but would you ever notice that? It's funny, just when you think you have everything covered, someone comes along with a real simple plot like this one, and ruins your plans.

Not all counterfeits are illegal, strictly speaking. There are reproductions which are usually modern copies of fairly modern coins. There are also modern reproductions of ancient coins. These types of copies are usually legal and are made so someone can own what would otherwise be a very expensive coin. There are also illegal copies that are mode for the purpose of passing off the copies as the original item. These are counterfeits or forgeries. As you see not all counterfeits are of modern currency, coin collectors beware! Some of these counterfeits of ancient coins were actually done in ancient times while others are modern counterfeits of ancient coins. I don't know as much as I would like about this subject, but I do know that some of the ancient coins were crude and I would think that this would make them easier to counterfeit than modern coins and currency. The advent of copy machines and computers with printers and scanners has made counterfeiting even easier. There have been several cases that I know of where children have counterfeited money by just scanning it and printing out copies. You would think that the paper is a dead giveaway or even a close examination of the bills, yet they got away with it for awhile. Counterfeit bills are even harder to detect if they are included in a stack of real bills. Two counterfeit twenties in the middle of a stack of 8 or 10 bills that is passed in a department store or supermarket might slip through undetected. That is why bills should be put through scanner to guarantee that they are genuine.

When I think of ancient money, I often wonder if any forgeries are mistaken for real coins. How would anyone know if a new type of ancient coin is found that it was genuine, especially if the coin was counterfeited by ancient counterfeiters using ancient methods? Did you ever wonder what the Romans did if they found that you were counterfeiting? Justice seemed much simpler in those days, you were put to death. If you bore false witness against anyone, you were put to death. If you committed adultery, you were put to death. These were all considered very serious crimes. For lesser offenses the Romans applied punishment that was more like an eye for an eye. This meant that the punishment would fit the crime, in their eyes.

Counterfeiting doesn't only apply to currency. Things like jewelry and art were counterfeited along with other precious items. Counterfeiting reached a new height at the end of the 20th century when electronic goods such as computers, cameras, tvs, watches and the like were being put on the market that were not made by the company that their logos would indicate. So where will all this counterfeiting end? Will automobiles be counterfeited? It seems highly unlikely since these items are so large that the factories that make them would become noticeable.

We thought that things were bad when clothes began to be counterfeited. This began about 20 years ago en mass. It got so bad that Korea had to crack down on these factories and had so many copies of clothing brands that they gave them away to the homeless. So here you had all the homeless in Korea walking around in clothes that had labels like Levi, Gucci and Calvin Klein. They were better dressed than a lot of the working stiffs there.

So the next time you think you have found something of value at an extraordinary low price, or that bill you got in change looks funny, take a closer look. You may just turn out to be one of the millions of people who have received counterfeit goods without even knowing it.