[dudewheresmytardis]

Hi, I'm the Doctor, and as you can see (if you are actually that curious) I just joined, yeah. So anyway, being new here, and having done a brief but thourough search about this site, I realised that noone seems to have even the slightest clue about how to forge a US currency note, I am going to fix this problem. Why? Two reasons, FIRST; I enjoy spreading information that dis-services the current government, and SECOND; after a couple of years out of the scene, I need some decent templates to either build off of, or to use for comparisons. I'm not the type to use another person's template (it's only really your's if the final build is all your work) but I no longer have the reference library I once did, perhaps some of you with good or better quality (at least) will feel the urge to share with me, as I am right now with you.


The materials you need are actually rather simple, you can buy well, pretty much everything retail if you have too, but in terms of printers, keep in mind you are more than likely going to have to spend a lot of time measuring for the offset programmed into them to prevent precisely this activity. I preffer a colour laser (CMYK) printer, Brother's are nice to me, but whichever printer you use, whatever quality you print, be familliar with your speciffic printer. If you nail the inbuilt offset (or manage an obscure foreign brand that always prints at perfect scale) you can pass bills through machines. Watermarking is simple and can be simulated in a variety of ways, my favourite though I'll get into later, all of them can be done cheaply.

Printer - use what you have but aim for a good colour laser, but you'll also need a decent inkjet too.

Template - as in any forgery project, build a good one yourself, I preffer a PS7 layered template that can be broken down and fed into alternate printing programs.

OV pigment dye - pearl ex is a good starting point, but there is a wide variety out there, hunt real art stores, you're going to have to mix this custom, Green/Gold and interference gold pretty much nail it.

Transparent Liquid Medium - you'll be mixing your pigment with something won't you? This is what you'll be using to simulate OV inks (pretty accurately too)

Spare Inkjet Cartriges - for loading the mixed ink into

Elmer's School Glue - seriously, this stuff is usefull when you laminate your bills, water it down

Paper - this you might have to order, you're looking for a fibreous material that has about the same ripping feel and look as a real dollar, this is a tactile process, I bleached a bill completely, cut down small sections and threw them into a sample pack I had happened on, (I'm still going through suppliers, though I have found a few that can provide about 80%) this is a process I'll leave each to go through themselves. Idealy you're looking for a half-weight version of as near identical non-acid (non UV reactive) currency paper or simillar. Actual purchase price is not too bad. Ipreffer a roll, as I'm going to be cutting this up anyway, a roll is far less suspicious than sheets sized to match bill-sheets.

Lanolin - this magic ingredient can be found in most arts and crafts stores. Buy a counterfeit pen and play arround with mixing this into a liquid you can spounge onto the paper, this sort of waterproofs the bill, it prevents the ink of the counterfeit detection pen from actually bleeding through which triggers a chemical reaction. Try one of these pens on a piece of butcher's paper or a thermal reciept if you don't believe, they say the receipt is a real bill usually. This is the same chemical used on real bills, and is usually washed out if you bleach a bill, THERE IS NO SPECIAL QUALITY TO THE PAPER IN US BILLS INTRINSICALLY, they just add lanolin before they cut them.

Paper Cutter - Duh. get a decent one, you don't really want to cut more than five complete layers at a time anyway, but it needs to be accurrate.

Paper Cutter Guide - I always have this made custom. Draw out a guide based on your papercutter with the exactl measurements for the bill, do this for both cuts, horizontal and vertical. Go to any machine shop and have them make these from a clean steel, they should essentially be little steel plates the length, and width individually

Spounges - For the lanolin wash, and the glue wash

Something flat and heavy - a clean piece of steel from a machine shop will work wonderously, two even better.

Ok, now, you have a spectacular template and all the stuff, first, print off the red and blue fires, these should be done well, fade parts of your little red and blue squiggle template so they look like they are going under other fibres. Print that off first on both halves of the full sheet. Now, on the inside face of one sheet, print the watermark. I like to use MICR toner for this, with a semi transparent template. I can also print any ghost images this way by using heavy Y and light C/M with a lightly coloured template. I then spread one sheet with watered down elmer's and the other I make barely damp. Line up both sheets on your appropriately sized slab of metal, brush out any bubles with a spatula (if you've ever done your own window tinting you can figure this out) and then press down with your other metal slab, though you're slabs should be covered with some fabric or fine felt for best results. once this is dried you will have a sheet that is pretty much the same as what the fed gets from Crane & Co up in Boston.

This sheet you will then feed into your printer as you print the back, the front, the serial numbers, and then you will move to to your inkjet printer. Having mixed up a good custom substitute of ink with the proper pigment matches, and loaded the ink into the cleaned out cartridges, you're going to print out any optical variable portions of your template. This requires a sepparate template done in black. For the $100, I use a base colour of black (in the template)for the whole piece which is printed first with Green-Gold mix, and then a sepparate time with a sepparate template for the wavy lines, which I go over in a mix of interference gold. This reproduces the effect on the 100 in the lower right-hand courner.

The easiest way I've found for doing serials, is to load a modified version of the "greenback" font made by Hoefler & Jones, into a custom Versa Cheque template, leaving only the cheque number area, the cheque number being of course started at a certain serial number and been accurately placed.

After printing wash the overall sheet with a lanolin solution that will suffice, and then cut using your guides. Throw a bunch in a drying machine to rough them up a bit if you want, but with this method you've got all of verification points nailed.

BTW a new $100 bill in a vacuum chamber at sea level, DOES in fact weigh 1.0000 grams