Kim Jong Il is all about the Benjamins, baby.
The government's printing presses work every day making American $100 bills. The bills have red and blue fibers woven into the fabric. Watermarks and security ribbons are painstakingly put into the paper. Ink is pressed onto the paper by huge intaglio presses, cut exactly to size, and bundled for distribution around the world. And the government making those US $100 bills is North Korea.
Sadly, those American $100 bills are coming from Pyongyang, North Korea. They are perfect, from the pictures to the ink to the watermark. The masterful forgeries cannot be detected, unless taken to the "local" US Federal Reserve Bank.
From Slate.com:
The FBI claims an international ring has trafficked weapons, drugs, fake cigarettes, and more than $5 million in "Supernotes" to North America. What are Supernotes? Counterfeit $100 bills of very high quality. Supernotes are incredibly deceptive. They're printed on cotton-fiber paper using the same expensive "intaglio" printing presses used by the U.S. government. An intaglio press creates tiny ridges on a piece of paper by forcing it into the ink-filled grooves of an engraved plate at very high pressure. That's what gives dollars—and Supernotes—their characteristic feel.
A member of the Congressional Research Service reported that the government of North Korea produces millions of dollars a year with intaglio presses. In the meantime, the government ordered an extensive redesign of U.S. currency in 1996. (Supernote versions of the new $100 bills have been discovered.)
The Treasury Department estimates that 60 percent of U.S. currency is held overseas, where Supernotes seem to be in wider circulation. In 1998, Russia's central bank estimated that $4 billion in Supernotes were floating around the country. And this past March, Supernotes turned up in Peru.
If you think this program is insidious, it is. North Korea is producing hundreds of millions of fake US dollars a year. And those North Korean $100 bills don't stay in North Korea, my friends. They're not for internal use -- they're using that funny money to finance their government's operations. Treasury officials have admitted that the recent changes to the dollar printing processes are to counter North Korean Supernotes.
From the Washington Times:
North Korea's government has produced more than $45 million in high-quality fake $100 bills since 1989 and is the world's only state-sponsored producer of the so-called "supernote," according to U.S. law-enforcement officials.
The recent arrest of Sean Garland, head of the communist Workers Party of Ireland, provided the first confirmation of the Pyongyang government's links to the supernote or superdollar, which was discovered as part of a 16-year-old probe by the U.S. Secret Service, which is in charge of investigating illegal money production.
Vic Erevia, assistant special agent in charge of the criminal investigative division at the Secret Service, said the probe resulted in 160 arrests linked to counterfeiting and related activities worldwide.
Meanwhile, the State Department yesterday defended Treasury Department sanctions imposed in September on the Banco Delta Asia in Macao for its role in North Korean counterfeiting and money laundering.
North Korea has produced 19 variations of the supernote since it first appeared in Manila in 1989, law-enforcement officials said. Each variation was an improvement and looked and felt almost identical to genuine $100 bills. A close look shows the printing on a supernote is slightly lighter than that on a genuine note. The bills were printed on North Korea's intaglio-process offset printing presses bought in the 1970s. The machines are used by governments worldwide to print currency and by private firms that do so. The North Korean supernotes are considered the highest-quality forgeries.
So remember: next time you have an American $100 bill in your hand, it may be fake. Kim Jong Il's fingerprints may still be on it.