Scanners Cash In on Counterfeits

Sveta and Vova already had a storefront and stacks of brand-new business cards.


As the two Muscovites looked ahead to their first day of commerce, they made one final investment, the tool that would turn them into real biznesmeny: their first ultraviolet, magnetic, dimension-detecting banknote scanner.


"Does it just spit them out the back?" Vova asked the salesman they went to for their counterfeit detector, as a machine inhaled a stack of 500-ruble notes. "Wait. Where is it going?"


The salesman smiled reassuringly as the machine checked, stacked and ejected another pile of cash.


With interbank transfers inextricably tangled and money changing hands at an incredible pace, Moscow has become a world capital of cash liquidity. Last year alone, the Russian police confiscated about 9.5 billion rubles and $2.5 million in counterfeit banknotes, according to a report by the Associated Press. And salesmen like Jack Melkonian have found one of the few markets where a pen-sized dollar bill verifier is a viable gift idea.


"This isn't for big business," said Melkonian, demonstrating his streamlined, attractive MD-3 Magnetic Ink Detector, which retails for $99. "This is more suitable for people like you and me."


The Swiss businessman's main line of work is needles -- his firm supplies 20,000 different models to Russian textile factories -- but with a seasoned eye on the market, he decided to branch out into cash-scanning. Leaps forward in printing technology have made counterfeiting a more exact science, especially in the unregulated cash bonanza of the Moscow marketplace, he pointed out. "In this part of the world, you never know what you're getting," said Melkonian, who also cited a Russian journalist's report that 15-20 percent of the dollar bills in circulation in Russia in 1993 were counterfeit.


"I think this market could be quite important," he said. Which is good news for the MD-3 Magnetic Ink Detector. "We bought it in bulk."


For currencies that are treated with magnetic ink -- like the American dollar, the Deutsche mark, the Japanese yen and the British pound -- a magnetic detector is the most reliable way of weeding out counterfeit money, according to Alexander Samitin of the Russian firm Bank Systems. These machines are priced in the $100 range for individual bill checkers, and Cashscan, the most popular and ubiquitous Korean-made model, costs about $150.


Another popular method is an ultraviolet light test, which reveals paper quality. A counterfeit bill glows bright white, whereas real currency does not change color. Also, many recently minted bills contain tiny colored hairs that appear, brightly scattered across the bill, under ultraviolet light.


Of course, not all of Moscow's counterfeiters are a match for high technology.


Inside a storefront on the Old Arbat, Sasha processes tens of thousands of dollars, rubles and marks a day. The cashier, who would not give his last name, said he had turned over a lot of counterfeit money to the bank. He also said it did not take a rocket scientist to spot the fakes.


"You know something is wrong when someone comes in here with their whole salary in Argentinean pesos," he said. "And then we get a lot of money that's just xeroxed. It's just paper."


Once he received a packet of $5 bills that had been doctored into $50s, with zeros drawn on the corners but no changes made to the script on the bill, which reads "five dollars" in three places.


"It was clear that these guys had never seen a $50 bill in their lives," said Sasha, laughing. "I couldn't believe it. People can be so stupid."