Making Money

Interesting profile of Wesley Weber on the Canadian Business website. Weber is (or was) a major counterfeiter who used social engineering and a bunch of ink-jet printers to duplicate large quantities of Canadian $100 bills. The article goes into how he circumvented the security features of the currency and how he got caught... bq. Counterfeiting is on the rise in Canada. And nobody did it better--or did more damage--than Wesley Weber, the man who crippled the $100 bill And more: bq. Approximately $40 billion worth of bills now circulates in the Canadian economy. It's changing hands at any given moment. For cups of Tim Hortons coffee. For T-shirts at the Gap. Cafeteria food. Diapers and cigarettes at the corner store. Marijuana from the pimply teenager with the rusty bicycle. Canadians put it in their wallets and fork it over with confidence, secure in the knowledge that it's the most liquid asset going. Some people rarely look at receipts or count their change, let alone examine the Queen's mug to see if anything's amiss. bq. But that confidence is quickly becoming a hazardous oversight. Last year, the Bank of Canada reported a record $12.7 million in counterfeit currency in circulation, up from $4.9 million in 2002. Most of it was imitation $10s and $20s. "A large part of the increase in overall crime [last year] was the result of the more than 138,000 counterfeiting incidents reported by police," noted Statistics Canada in July. "Counterfeiting incidents now represent 5% of all Criminal Code offences, making it the sixth-largest crime category in Canada." Interesting stuff. Canada has since released a new $100 with even more security features...